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I tend not to visit opium dens; the yield is usually meagre. Too many exhausted men and women attempting to subdue too much sorrow; too many sins compressed under a new heavier one. I have no need of that. But I followed when the embodiment of my deepest desires, a Good Man, walked into such a sickly-sweet smelling establishment on a wet, dark London night between the wars.
Sometimes I establish myself in a pocket of time and explore it, just to see what I can find. I have an optimistic nature and stick stubbornly to the belief that each age has its hidden gems. I spent some time in London during the dying years of the 19th century. I rented rooms in one of the more fashionable parts of town and paid so much for them that my landlady was shamed into question-less subservience. She even tolerated the sweet smell of opium-laced cigarette smoke drifting from underneath my door. But I think it appalled her I didn't consume my opium as laudanum mixed with brandy like most decent women. I find opium useful when time slows down to a trickle. Time is a relative concept for me of course.
When I say Good Man, I don’t mean just any half-hearted volunteer at a soup kitchen, who believes an occasional dip into London's filth will bleach his soul white. My idea of a Good Man is a rare creature. It requires a special kind of passion to qualify. A passion that burns with a particular hue – battlefield crimson.
The problem with passion is that, like any fire, it consumes itself. To get the optimal use out of a Good Man I need to make love to him at the right time. After a crucial point of equilibrium, goodness burns a man to cinders in the clenching of a fist. A Good Man may not have the staying power of an evil one, but the shorter brilliance of his life is more than made up for by the mesmerising beauty of his downfall.
I prowled the streets endlessly, night and day - listening, smelling, looking around. Nothing. Just big egos crammed into small minds, paper-pushers who fought wars from behind their desks. I smelt no extraordinariness; no man looked at me with bright eyes where I could see shadows of future armies marching to their doom, or the beautiful glow of burning cities. No enticing waft of iron and blood from bodies passing me in the street. And I most certainly didn’t smell a Good Man. That is, not before I heard the rumours about a new clinic in the East End.
At the time when the news started circulating, I felt I’d been sentenced to an eternity of boredom within my already eternal existence. I had sunk so low that I spent many evenings alone in my rooms, reminiscing about past glories, reading War and Peace (I skipped the sections about Peace. Despicable fellow).
Anyway, the story I picked up was that a man unannounced had opened a clinic at the East End one day. He put a sign above the door that simply said HEALER in capital letters, with a section in small print on the actual door stating that he would adjust his fee to the patient’s ability to pay. Some people shook their heads and walked on, but there are many sick and poor people in the East End who have nothing to lose.
It didn’t take long before the man had his first patients, and it quickly became apparent that he was good. Not that he healed everybody, but he healed many, and almost everyone left his clinic a little more at ease than when they arrived.
The news rippled and spread, and in the violet hour I set out towards the East End what looked like a cross-section of London’s multifaceted misery stood lined up outside his clinic every morning.
It was heart-wrenching, and if I had been designed that way I would have cried. It also alarmed me for another reason. This level of wretchedness would leave the healer a burnt-out shell in no time. I had to act fast. I knew I had found my man. Even though I hadn't set eyes on him yet, I could smell him, and I had that tingle on my skin from events flickering in the realm of possibility.
I walked the neighbouring streets, smoked, and waited as the violet hour deepened. When the last patient disappeared, it was far into the night. I stood in the shadow of the building opposite; dense fog clung to my black coat and crimson dress.
The door opened, and a tall man came out. He stopped outside the door for a moment and stared straight ahead of him as if he looked through the solid firmament of streets into a world beyond. He was curiously dressed. The jacket he wore was worn but contemporary. However, his trousers were made of soft skins that were tucked into well worn boots. Both boots and trousers looked from another age entirely. Then I knew he wasn't from these parts. In the tangled woods between dimensions, he had somehow stumbled upon the wrong path.
When he started walking at a brisk pace, I followed and clacked my boot heels against the damp cobbles. After a while he stopped and turned around. I stepped into the glare of a gas-lamp and opened my coat to reveal the red slash of my dress. He looked at me in silence as the air thickened between us. Finally, he swung around on his heel and walked on. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. I followed in the same noisy manner, but he didn't turn to look at me again. Instead, he increased his speed in the direction of the docks. He walked with a dignified grace I found affecting.
‘A leader of men, a healer and a warrior lost,’ I thought, ‘but I’ll help you.’
In the end he stopped in front of crudely fashioned door covered in peeling grey paint, pushed it open with his fists and disappeared inside. I followed through a smoke-filled bar, past a torn curtain into a large room beyond. Fizzling gas-flares threw a ghastly light on the bodies of men and women curled up on low couches along the wall. Then I moved in front of him and blocked his view to the room.
I saw him up close for the first time. He looked exhausted, but in the large grey eyes that met mine was a blue flicker. Lines from a poem drifted across my mind.
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not…
‘Why do you follow me?’ he asked.
‘I can help you find your way back,’ I said. ‘And I can offer you another way to temporary oblivion than you’ll find in an opium den. My touch in exchange for the darkest part of you.’
‘Who, what, are you?’
‘I’m War,’ I said.
He looked me hard in the eyes. I don’t know what he saw. My eyes are ancient apertures with a mind of their own. I can’t control what people see in them. As he looked his expression, as well as bone tired, became sad, resigned and in the end determined. I sensed he’d reached a decision.
‘That’s settled then, lady. Your touch for the darkest part of me.’
Whatever he’d seen, it had made him believe me. Maybe because I understood a part of what he was. It’s a powerful thing to be recognised when you’re utterly alone.
I walked close and put my cheek to his, my hands hanging loose at my side.
‘What,’ I whispered, ‘should I call you?’
‘I have many names, but you can call me Aragorn.’
My landlady peered through a chink in the door as we walked past and up the stair. She didn’t say anything, but I felt the heat of her disapproval burn a hole in my coat. If she hadn't suited my purposes, I would have finished her off long ago.
Aragorn looked around my austere flat, curious. I travel light and don’t keep any paraphernalia. There was a large bed, two chairs and a table in front of the fireplace, and not much more. On the wall hung one of my favourite paintings, The Triumph of Death, by Brueghel. I find it glorious and moving, but Aragorn didn't share my opinion.
‘It is grotesque,’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘I watched the painter paint it, and think he managed to catch...something essential.’
He gave me another hard look.
‘You have been around for a very long time.’
‘I have. Time is my older brother.’
Aragorn sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his eyes.
‘I took a wrong turning, somehow,’ he said, and I don’t know how I ended up in this terrible place. I walked through deep underground caverns, past...’
‘A sunless sea,’ I said.
...where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Aragorn smiled a little. ‘Yes. Beautifully put.’
I continued, more to myself than to him.
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
‘Is that a warning?’ he asked.
I didn’t answer
When I sat down beside him, he touched the collar of my dress before he carefully moved his hand further down. He obviously enjoyed taking his time, wanted to stretch the moments and wrap them around us like a veil.
For me there is no contradiction between the tenderness at the beginning and the bloodshed at the end. That has always been the trajectory I prefer to follow, and in the case of a Good Man, the only one that works.
Aragorn was looking for a way into my dress. In the end he worked it out and slowly unpicked buttons and clasps. When he pulled the dress off my shoulders and discovered the corset underneath, he shook his head.
‘What kind of age is this?’ he asked. ‘An age of dirt, fog, sickness and poverty, and women locked in and tied up beneath their clothes. It is like someone has brandished the One Ring.’
‘It is rather primitive, I am afraid,’ I said, as he started to loosen the strings of the corset. ‘I’m sorry this is where our ways met.’
When the corset was off, he let his fingers trace the gently curved snake of my spine. It tingled like a bowstring at the touch of his fingertips. He healer’s hands elicited a strange response. Something in my chemistry rose to the challenge of a hitherto unknown stimulus. I thrive on opposites and strife, and this was no exception. There was obviously a flowing back of energy, as Aragorn lifted his hand from my skin and flexed his fingers.
He pulled me down under him and let his hands and lips continue their slow, roaming downwards trajectory. I pulled him gently into the dark maelstrom of my touch, while the wind whipped angry bands of rain across the window.
Afterward he put his head between my breasts.
‘If Time is your older brother, what is Death?’
‘My twin brother. We don’t always get on. He is terribly emotional.’
‘The twins Death and War... Did you have a happy childhood?’
‘We are part of the elemental fabric, so we skipped that bit.’
Aragorn was silent for a while.
‘I am flattered and alarmed by your attention, lady...War. Can I ask why you have bestowed it on me?’
‘You were a Good Man in the right place.’
“Or the wrong one....” he whispered into the warm hollow between my hair and my neck. He fell asleep in that position. Whoever said that the embrace of War does not bring comfort?
Next morning I told Aragorn I was coming along to help him. He looked at me with suspicion.
‘Why?’
‘It makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘Who is there to fight wars in the end, if we don't heal the sick and the injured?’
‘I can’t deny your logic is faultless, so I accept your offer.’
On our way there he offered med his arm. The gesture was relaxed and natural, and I found myself leaning into it. I thoroughly enjoyed this wistful-tender interlude between wars. I was his dark friend in need, his sister of dubious mercy, his sweet downfall.
I proved my worth, but it must be said I lack a certain bedside manner. Aragorn’s patients looked at me with badly veiled fear when I projected my most brilliant smile, exposing a crescent of gleaming white teeth, in their direction. In the end Aragorn ordered me sharply to be unsmilingly cordial and say as little as possible.
We did this together every day for quite a while, how long exactly I have no idea. Every night I dragged him exhausted home and provided him with food and oblivion in the form of opium-cigarettes and lovemaking.
‘Don’t you ever get tired?’ he asked.
‘No. I am not human,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I keep forgetting.’
One night he turned his back to me.
‘We work all day to heal the sick and infirm, and the next day they are back in equal numbers. It is like emptying the sea with a spoon.’
‘You can but do what is possible in the time you spend in this wretched place. And you do it well,’ I said.
‘I do a good job of healing people so they can go out and fight your wars?’
‘What people do with their lives after you have healed them should be none of your concern. And I never force anyone to fight any wars. The men and women who come to me come of their own accord.’
He turned to face me. ‘I was severed from my world, floating in a sea of unknowing, clinging to the healing skill which is the deepest part of me – like a drowning man – so an easy victim perhaps. Nonetheless, you are hard to resist, lady War.’
‘I was looking for someone like you to love and cherish. I had been for some time.’
‘Looking for a Good Man to fashion to your dark designs, you mean?’
‘If you want to put it like that.’
Aragorn blew the candle out.
‘When I took the wrong turning in the labyrinthic undergrowth between dimensions, I was on my way to meet a group of small people in a particular inn. And when I return to that path, I know I may follow it in a different direction than the one I would have taken had it not been for this unasked-for detour via your arms. You can count that as a victory perhaps.’
Towards morning I kissed his forehead, and then bit him in the neck. Just hard enough to feel a drop of blood pass my lips. Aragorn sat up with a jolt and put a shaking hand to the wound.
He leant forward and perhaps saw aeons of battlefields behind my eyelids.
‘It is time for our ways to part,’ he said. ‘You said you know where I go to find my way back.’
I nodded. We sat apart, silence sedimenting between us – quenching his anger.
‘Now I have marked you,’ I said. ‘Now you’ll be easier to find again when the times comes.’ He pulled me close and folded me to him in his passionate, wistful way. A last embrace before the gathering of the dark – as I am sure he would put it.
We got up, got dressed and walked together through empty streets towards the docks, holding hands. At the end of a narrow alley of ramshackle storage buildings I stopped. In front of us was a wall with a narrow slit in the stone and the faint outline of steep stairs beyond. Aragorn looked around him and then looked me up and down as if to make sure he’d remember me. He straightened my dress with his large hands and buttoned up my coat. When he had closed the top button, he raised his hand further to cradle my chin.
‘Now that you have marked me, I know we’ll meet again War, even if I’d rather not imagine the circumstances. In the meantime, I’ll hold you to your logic and ask you to keep my clinic going in my absence, with or without blood money. I don’t care how you do it. The sick and the poor certainly don’t.’
I gave him my promise. We stood palm to palm, forehead to forehead. The he walked away and let the wall swallow him.
**
When I leave a pocket of time, I always erase any traces of my presence there.
I packed my books and my few dresses, rolled up the canvas for The Triumph of Death, and killed my landlady. It was quick, a thumb against the top of her windpipe as she dreamed her sweet evening laudanum-dreams. I watched her still form with solemn satisfaction, lit a last opium cigarette and blew her a shroud of smoke. It billowed around her shoulders in a merry dance before it sank to the floor. A fitting vigil I thought.
I took my bag, closed the door behind me and walked into the fog-laden street – during the violet hour.
**
I have never been very interested in the paraphernalia of war, the trinkets of power; be it rings, wands, catapults, canons or automatic weapon systems.
I keep and protect the flame of crimson abandon. When I know the time has come, I’ll navigate the maze between worlds and seek you out. I’ll cradle your blood-stained head in my lap and give you a last glimpse of me before you close your beautiful grey eyes.
Or….
I‘ve been thinking. How did you find your way that day? How did you navigate between dimensions, through caves of ice and silver, past sunless seas? You felt lost, stumbled ahead in the half-dark, but I wonder. Did I call out for you somehow, did you respond with that on the other side of you? Dark to dark? I like that possibility. Darkness is beautiful. It has its own seasons, its own polarity.
There is no hurry. The blood mist of the end game doesn’t have to settle just yet. I’ve seen millions of end games. A sense of déjà vu has become hard to expel. No-one likes the smell of charred flesh in the morning better than me, but I have always been less enthusiastic about other aspects. The silence after battle, the lingering taste of fear: oppressive, tremulous, like a mute child who sits huddled in a corner and bites its fingers until they bleed.
And then there’s my infuriating twin brother. Death will sit huddled in his usual pose. His eyes brim-full of tears, his hands shaking. Only I know the tears and the shakes are from self-pity. I have always hated pompous, sentimental men.
Yes, it can all wait.
I have never heard Aragorn laugh, and I’d like to. I could navigate the measureless caves, guided by the blood-compass on my tongue - the taste of him, just beneath the skin.
Walk along the shore of sunless seas towards an inn rather than a battlefield.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
I’ll sit down and wait for him in a dark corner. Light a pipe, drink a pint. I blend in easily – millennia of practise. I’ll look for the brief flash as other pipes are lit and faces illuminated. I’ll find him. Then I’ll shake my copper hair out of my hood, and he’ll recognise me.
(Note: Poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Christina Rossetti)