Stolen Hearts Chapter Twenty Eight
A servant entered the Queen's chambers quietly with her head bowed in respect. Bulma was reading an old philosophical book she had found on the top shelf of the cupboard while Trunks was out playing.
"Sorry to disturb you madam but a letter has arrived from your husband, King Yamcha."
"Thank you," Bulma said absent mindedly taking the letter, it was always the bad news that traveled the fastest.
It seemed odd that a man like Yamcha should be king. He had no extraordinary qualities that made him worthy of kingship, but that was the way the dice had rolled.
Her father's death in an inconsequential battle by mischance about five years ago still stung in her heart. His death had left too many things undone, it was too soon, she wasn't ready to lose yet another. It seemed like there was always something he wanted to tell her, but never got a chance to. She remembered with bitterness all the "I'm sorry's" she'd received. Whenever anything goes awry people say that infuriating phrase.
Sorry? It sounded so simple, so nonchalant, so………nothing. Sorry to wake you, sorry I stepped on your foot, sorry I snapped at you, sorry your father is dead.
Bulma slowly read the letter. She made no movement. She turned neither red nor pale, nor dropped the letter, nor stared in front of her. The letter was indeed one of bad news. It told of the failure at the last hope for peace between the Fey and Eves and now it seemed the largest battle of them all was on the verge of breaking, a monumental battle that would surely mean absolute destruction for one side or the other.
Bulma felt a surge of anger and sorrow flow over her. Why had this dreadful war ever begun? Had the whole world simply lost its mind? This was all madness! Surely they could see the damage they would cause in this fruitless battle was absolutely unnecessary? What was to be gained? What was it all about? Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds.
It was a war without meaning, which helped no one. But alas, they were doomed to fight yet another battle regardless. War is like a fire. One may start it, but it will spread all over, senseless and uncontrollable so that the source is soon forgotten in the fray. It is never about any one thing in particular anyway.
Bulma was tired out. She was still a prisoner in this world, her son was unfulfilled, her father was dead, her husband was faltering, her country was on there verge of a vicious bloody war. Yet she could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of her heart had not been ravaged. She was a Valkyrie and her soul was intertwined into the hope for saving the world. It was her essence. But she didn't know how.
In her heart she believed that people were perfectible: that they were on a whole more decent then beastly: that good was worth trying for. She had been forged as a weapon for the world on the assumption that people were good. The service for which she had been destined had been against force, the mental illness of humanity.
All her efforts to achieve peace for her people and the world had been progressive steps in the endeavor for which she had been bred. Might- to have ended it- would have made the world happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that people were decent.
Looking back on her life, it seemed to her that she had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever she had checked it, had broken through again at a new place, setting her to do her work again.
It was the flood of war, and she could never again without her whole heart regain her power or will, for these people who were supposedly good had taken from her the staff upon which she leaned. Her heart would never be whole without him.
It seemed as though she should quit while she was ahead, or what she really meant by that was to quit while she was behind, but not by too much. In reality you're never ahead. If you try, try again you're most likely to sink deeper by finding new ways to lose, for there are always more ways to lose then win. There was only one strategy that seemed like it could bring victory: encourage others to try, try again then observe their failures.
Perhaps man was on a whole a villain, and their hearts were deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And that would make the purpose of her life a vain one. Chivalry and justice had been a child's illusion, and it wore away at her spirit. The knifes in her back stung wickedly.
Behind this thought was a worse one, with which she dared not grapple. Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, only a machine in an insensate universe- his courage no more then a reflex to danger, like an automatic jump at a pin-prick.
Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at a pin prick was a virtue, and humanity was only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction. Perhaps might was a law of nature, needed to keep its survivors fit. Her head ached but she could not sleep.
Why did people fight? Was it wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts? One person could hardly force millions against their will. If he had commanded the people to 'stand on their heads' they surly would not have followed, however cleaver or persuasive or deceitful or even terrible his inducements.
A leader must offer something which appealed to those he led. He might give impetus to a falling building but surly it had to have been toppling on it own account before it fell. If this was true then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men, they were national movement, deeper, more subtle in origin. It certainly did not feel as though she or Adrastus, Volsung's son, had led their county to misery. If it was so easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if it were a pig on a string, then why had she failed to lead it into peace and justice? She had been trying.
If she nor Adrastus had set this misery in motion, who had? How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed to be rooted in its antecedents. It seemed to lead back to forever. People had gone on, age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody was inextricable.
It was as if everything would lead to sorrow as long as people refused to forget the past. The wrongs of everybody can only be righted by the blessing of forgetting them, that was essential. Everything was rooted in the past! The actions of any sort of generation might have incalculable consequences in another, like a pebbles ripples in a pond. It seemed the only hope was to not act at all, like a pebble not thrown, but that would be hateful.
What was right from wrong? Who decided? If I were to have my time again, she thought, I would have buried myself straight away for fear of doing which might lead to woe.
The past must be obliterated and a new start made. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Couldn't they by now star afresh without remembrance, rather then live forward and backward at the same time? They couldn't build a future by avenging the past. They should just sit down as family and accept the peace of the gods.
Unfortunately people could not do this. They were like children crying out that they would build a house, but when it came to the building, they had not the practical ability. They did not know the way to choose the right materials. Or maybe they just never had a chance. Every time they started a structure, it just kept getting blown down by the next wind.
Perhaps the great cause of war was possession. Perhaps wars were fought because people said my kingdom, my wife, my possessions. Perhaps as long as people tried to possess things separately from each other, even honor and souls, there would be wars forever. Perhaps wars only happened between those who had and those who had not, but no one could really define this state of "having".
A knight in a silver suit would definitely call himself a "have not" if her saw a knight in a golden one. Nations and individuals were always crying out "mine mine mine" when they should be saying "ours." If this was true then people would have to share everything, even feelings and lives. They would have to throw themselves into the force of life, like a drop into the sea, for the fate of this man or that was less then a drop, although some were sparkling ones, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.
But something in her head wouldn't accept this godly view. Sweeping and drastic remedies could cut out anything- and life with that cut. Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all. Advising heaven to earth was useless.
Perhaps war was due to fear: to fear of reliability. Unless there was truth, there was always danger in everything outside the individual. This uncertainty could become a menace. Perhaps wars happened because nations had not confidence in honesty. They were frightened, and so they fought. Nations were like people- they had feelings of inferiority, or of superiority, or of revenge, or of fear. It was right to personify nations.
Another fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing- literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines. There was no boundary between the countries. People could keep their culture and local law so the imaginary line on the earth's surface only needed to be unimagined.
There was a general idea that it was wrong to fight in wars of any sort. But there is one fairly good reason for fighting- and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you have sort of a duty to stop him. 'But both sides always say that the other started them.'
Of course they do, and it is a good thing that it should be so. At least it shows that both sides are still conscious, inside themselves, that the wicked thing about war is its beginning. There is no excuse for war, none whatsoever, and whatever wrong your nation might be doing to mine-short of war-my nation would be wrong if it started a war to redress it. A murderer is not allowed to plead that his victim was oppressing him so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be addressed by reason, not force.
Suspicion and fear: possessiveness and greed: resentment and ancestral wrong: all these seemed to be a part of it. Yet she was not to the solution. She could not see a real solution. She was too tired and miserable to think constructively. She was only a woman who meant well, who had tried to raise her head up after being beaten down time and time again, but she had ended in failure. To do at all had proved too difficult. This battle was sure to be the end of everything.
Bulma proved to be not quite done by lifting her head from the desk. There had always been something invincible in her heart, a tincture of grandness in simplicity. She sat upright and reached for the pen. She would stop this war if it killed her. The hope for making it would lie in culture. If people could read and write and love, not just eat and sleep and fight, then there was still a chance that they might come to reason.
'My Dear Husband,
I have received your letter and it has upset me greatly. Please do all you can to hold off this monster until I arrive on the morrow. I know you would advise otherwise, but please, there has to be something I can do. We have to stop this. We have to try.
Take care, your Wife'
Bulma sat back and sighed. She wasn't sure if Yamcha would take note of her plee. He was polite, but it was the quiet ones who did the mischief. She must hurry. The silence in the room was one that you could cut with a knife and it felt like a blade at her throat.
Bulma looked absently at the clock, then fell forward in her chair when she realized the hour.
"Where on heaven and earth is that boy! He should have been home long ago!"
Bulma was quickly thrown into the panic that surely all mother's fall too, only hers was magnified to the nth degree for her son was all she really had left and his welfare was the most important thing in the world to her. She paced the grounds frantically calling and sadly returned inside when the guards said they would take it from there.
Sitting glumly in her chair and thinking of all the horrors that could have happened to her poor precious child by now and what a fool she had been, she was interrupter but a clumsy knocking at the door.
AN: kinda a more contemplative chapter, but important. well tell me what you think, thanks, and until next time