Mistress of Night and Dawn (23 page)

Aurelia glanced down and saw that the two hearts – on the underside of her wrist and by her cunt – were now shining like fire, as if the countless lights in the trees were all pointing in her direction.

She also knew that familiar sensations were beginning to run through her body and she was unable to control them. But rather than feel vulnerable at being so naked and exposed in the open air – she wasn’t cold at all, as if the whole area she was standing in did not answer to the normal call of nature, night and temperature – she felt curiously assured, dominant, expectant.

The circle of nymphets stepped back, opening up a new path for Aurelia and she moved ahead, the blazing fire of light in the heart of the forest ahead of her acting like a magnet. A warm, sensuous breeze floated against her bare skin like a never-ending caress.

In a large, central clearing over which an eruption of multicoloured lights swam like an alien sun exploding in a thousand directions at once, stood a large clearing where the vast grass lawn was littered with a dozen or so canopies and tents, walls of white material fluttering like silk against limbs, at one with the gentle breeze. For a brief moment she felt like Alice in Wonderland and every tent opening was beckoning to her, begging her to enter, watch, taste whatever forbidden pleasures were concealed within.

Watch me.

Eat me.

Savour my juices.

Savour me.

Like telepathic voices coasting along invisible ley lines straight towards her brain.

It was like being drunk, even if Aurelia had precious little experience of ever being so. A curious sense of liberation, a light-headed giddiness that moved her feet and soul.

She peered inside the first tent, and laid eyes on a tangle of bodies in motion, embedded in each other, moving, undulating to the loud sounds of a beating heart, a raging tsunami of flesh and joy, a slow-motion earthquake whose inner rhythms and frenzied couplings called to her. A dizzying concert of voices, moans, frantic exhalations, sighs weighed down by all the memories of the world, the words become flesh.

Aurelia drew her breath, captivated by the spectacle, awe and wonder, unbridled lust and shock coursing through her at a rate of knots. Somehow she knew that if she stepped inside the tent, she would become its captive for ever and ever, like a fly in a spider’s web, a prisoner deep in the amber depths of centuries of lust.

With difficulty she tore her eyes away.

She walked to the next open canopy where long tables laden with food, fruit and drink, each more exotic in appearance and likely in taste than the one before, initially blocked the entrance. Cakes lovingly carved into the shape of swollen Fabergé eggs, avocados from which the finest of caviar could be scooped, tender morsels of meat and fish, declawed lobster pincers, rows of identical oysters and clams on beds of crumpled ice.

She paused. Fleeting silhouettes ran like ghosts around her, overtaking her, passing her, in perpetual motion along roads of laughter as she gathered her wits and peered nervously beyond the tall tables and, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the centaur she had crossed paths with earlier. He was sprawled across a confusion of silk cushions, his animal lower half now more obviously an artifice, his massive chest a swirl of dark curls, head back, legs wide apart, heavy-thighed. His mouth was wide open, and between his mighty legs a woman’s dark-haired head could be seen moving up and down, her mouth wrapped across the thick meat of the rigid cock which strained through the opening in his costume. The woman was on all fours, her buttocks in the air. Aurelia had a jolt of recognition – something about the soft curve of the woman’s arse, the way she moved – and she realized it was Siv.

She wanted to call out to her friend, but was hypnotised, silenced by the sheer beauty of the ritual, the evidenced slow reverence and hunger of Siv’s oral ministrations.

Aurelia’s heartbeat was dancing the light fantastic as she stood motionless, watching her friend and whoever the stranger was in oral congress, voyeuristically admiring the measured advance of the large penis’s shaft deeper into Siv’s mouth, and how a stream of profound pleasure animated her friend’s bared skin, moving below its surface, illuminating it with an inner glow with every new, imperceptible movement.

Frozen in fascination, Aurelia could not tear herself away from the spot, barely noticing the other couples, threesomes and moresomes dotted across the area, all active and dancing to the sound of their own inner tunes, fucking, thrusting, bucking, struggling, advancing and retreating, like beautiful beasts lounging amongst the sea of silk cushions that littered the canopy’s floor.

A shadow of fearsome light bounded across the room and the tangle of bodies almost changed colour. And then Aurelia noticed the presence of a solitary man, clothed, sitting squarely in a yoga-like position in a corner of the area: Walter. Between his hands was a lump of wet clay, which he was kneading and pummelling and twisting, an angelic smile on his lips, his dark, empty eyes darting from one copulating couple to another, capturing the essence of the action with the cleverness of his hands.

Aurelia began to realise that for every movement of his agile fingers, a couple somewhere under the night canopy also moved, providing him with a new angle, a new revelation, a new position. Walter was their conductor. A blind man leading an orchestra of unbound pleasure, leading each and every soul and body here towards their climax.

And what then? Aurelia wondered.

Siv stepped back slowly from the centaur’s open thighs and looked round. As she did so, she noticed Aurelia standing there transfixed.

She smiled and Aurelia’s heart froze.

Never had she witnessed such a blissful smile on her friend’s face. It was a smile of deep happiness, of reassurance, of ultimate contentment. Their eyes made contact. Siv’s shone with a terrible splendour.

I am home
, the glint in her pupils seemed to say to her friend.

A deep sigh of relief washed over Aurelia. Siv was here. She was okay. She was happy even. But as she watched her friend lower herself slowly onto the centaur, Aurelia couldn’t bear to look any longer for fear of bursting into tears. For she knew that from this moment onward, Siv now belonged to the Ball and its mysteries and they would never return to the life they had once shared.

She ran from the open canopy and found herself back in the open, trees scattered around her like slender barriers, grass under her feet, a tenuous and haphazard labyrinth of wood and leaves that felt alive to her senses. Her disorientation grew.

The lights from above the forest roof began to lower in intensity, and Aurelia imagined herself in the centre of a whirlpool, her feet unsteady, being washed from place to place between a welter of sounds, bare bodies brushing against her as they rushed by. She blinked and another tent appeared, dark against the wall of night, its silhouette carved against the fading lights. She had no doubt in her mind that this was her appointed destination, the ultimate reason she had been brought here. The funfair, the kiss, Gwillam Irving and his office, the inheritance – if inheritance it had been and not just a moneyed mirage to lure her here – the blind sculptor, that fateful night in the Bristol chapel, Lauralynn, Tristan, the new-found certainty rising inside her that nothing had been random.

It was like a fever marching through her, unstoppable, desired, fearsome.

Her apprehension grew and she raised her hand to brush her hair away under the garland of red flowers, the crown that only emphasised the pallor of her skin. She shivered. She was in an unknown wood, naked, vulnerable, lost.

As her limp hand fell, she caught sight of the image of the heart on her wrist. It was scarlet and now burned from the inside, a soothing fire, a source of heat and dull pleasure. She looked down and saw another tattoo now adorning her body, slightly off centre between her breasts, shadowing her real heart. Beating fiercely to their own rhythm, the heat like a blanket, a force field in which she was cocooned.

She looked up at the tent. A similar image of a fiery red heart stood out on the canvas where an opening lay, flaps of material shimmering in the night breeze.

Aurelia stepped forward.

Walked into darkness.

Stopped. Stood motionless.

As if by magic, the dark interior of the tent took on a blue, artificial hue and light slowly rose, illuminating her new surroundings.

There were no bodies in motion here, no tables bursting with food and wine, just an empty space in the centre of which an immensity of rich Arabian carpets were strewn. They made her think of Scheherazade and the
Thousand and One Nights
, brought to mind faint memories of the first time she had felt sexually aroused as a growing teenager when reading those exotic stories, and the guilt she had then experienced imagining herself as some sacrificial virgin to some dark and handsome sultan or adventurer.

A hand landed on her shoulder.

Aurelia emerged with a start from her reverie.

Turned.

Even before she set eyes on him, she smelled his scent, that unmistakable wind of fruit and musk and kindness and knew exactly who he was.

His voice was like honey, deep and tender.

‘Welcome back to the Ball, Aurelia.’

He was standing straight and still, just half a head taller than her. His face was a perfect blend of narrow oval and square jaw, his lips full, his cheekbones pronounced and his hair a kindly mat of dark-auburn curls.

She held her breath, as if to make the moment last for ever.

He was dressed in a simple white shirt, open wide at the collar, and a pair of tight, dark breeches as if he was an acrobat. Her gaze could not help but linger in the area of his crotch as she, with a deep blush running across her cheeks, remembered the feel of him inside her.

‘You . . .’ she muttered.

‘My name is Andrei,’ he said, looking into her eyes.

Aurelia felt like fainting as surging waves of relief and joy fought inside her.

‘You . . .’ she repeated, losing all power of intelligible speech.

His hand moved from her naked shoulder, and the realisation that she was still naked while he was still clothed made her feel ever so vulnerable.

‘It’s been . . .’ she attempted to say.

‘A long time coming,’ Andrei said.

Thomas had been riding the rails with hoboes and their like for a couple of years since his arrival in the country, just before the war had broken out in Europe. It was a perilous thing to do, hiding inside the boxcars of trains and seldom knowing what his destination would turn out to be. He had become an expert in avoiding the greedy brakemen, at waiting at watering tanks and railroad yards for trains to slow down. He had grown accustomed to sharing journeys and stories with the flotsam and jetsam of the early century, fractured version of the American dream, but unlike them it wasn’t hunger or despair that had forced him into this.

He had learned how to ride a blind and deck a train from experts like Josiah Flynt and Jack London and how to avoid getting locked inside a reefer by always carrying a piece of wood to keep the door from locking shut. He had also made good friends, suffered a few broken ribs and beatings by railroad thugs and fellow illegal passengers but, most of all, he had collected information. Piece by piece, word by word.

About the Ball.

It was five years since he had first heard of its shadowy existence. It had been one of countless extraordinary rumours that circulated freely amongst the students at Heidelberg University where he was studying English Language. But then the liberal consumption of alcohol and the dissipated ambience of the times encouraged such fantasies. Thomas had never lent much credence to the raft of apocryphal stories that spread like wildfire through the student community. People needed dreams to escape reality, Thomas reckoned, while he was a genuine realist and had no truck with illusions.

Like all students and professors, Thomas had been a regular in the brothels of the lower town. Not though, for all the reasons that his colleagues most likely suspected. He did not seek out whores because they were ever obliging, cheerful and truculent, or because for his first two years at Heidelberg he had needed a suitable release valve from the pressures of his studies in what was such a predominantly male environment, although those things helped too.

No. What Thomas sought was discretion.

Though he now lived as a man and could not remember a time when he had not thought of himself as one, regardless of the mechanics of his form or biological function, he could not escape the fact that he had been born a woman, no matter how hard he tried.

As a child, he had torn the frills from his dresses, ignored the dolls that he received as gifts from his grandparents, and sought pleasure in climbing trees instead of learning to bake or embroider. He had been indulged by a mother who didn’t know what else to do with him and ignored by a father who, intent on rising through the ranks as a public servant, was rarely home and paid no attention to such matters. But when he had grown older and had shorn his thick, long brown curls from his head with his mother’s sewing scissors and insisted on being called Thomas instead of Therese, things had reached a tipping point.

Fearful of how their small community might perceive even the smallest deviation from what they believed to be appropriate gender norms, his Protestant parents had packed Therese off to her grandparents for a time, where she supposedly married and moved abroad and Thomas had been created. His father had pulled some strings, fiddled with records and bribed an old friend who enrolled him in Heidelberg University as a male student.

Things were different in the larger centres, Berlin particularly, where the researcher Magnus Hirschfeld campaigned for gay and transgender rights and ran the ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’, which was all good and well, but Thomas did not want his body or his desires to be picked apart by some well-meaning scientist, examined like a butterfly pinned to a table top. He simply wished to live as a man, because he was a man. It ought to have been simple, but as he had grown older he had realised that it was not simple. Berlin might still be the centre of sexual liberalism in Europe, but other voices were growing in power.