Mistress of Night and Dawn (28 page)

As abruptly as he had grabbed her, he let her go again and walked away.

Aurelia felt as though he had taken her real heart with him and left her with only the tattooed likeness of a heart on her chest and below.

For the rest of that night a strange pressure lay over her throat, as if his hand was still there reminding her that she belonged to him. She welcomed the sensation as she slept, and when she woke to find her throat bare, she wept.

That would be her last night of relative normality.

In the morning, her training began.

When Aurelia began to rise the following morning, a hand flew over her face and gently held her eyelids closed. Her initial reaction was to scream. Then she remembered where she was. In the Network’s headquarters, about to begin her training as the new Mistress of the mysterious travelling Ball. It hadn’t been a dream after all.

She had been granted only a moment of accidental sight, just long enough to confirm that the space alongside her in bed remained empty. Andrei was gone. Her heart fell.

‘Eyes shut while bathing,’ whispered a voice that seemed neither masculine nor feminine.

The coverlet that she had slept under was swiftly removed, along with the cotton nightdress that she had been given to sleep in. She was led carefully into the stream of hot water that surrounded the futon and bathed.

Aurelia was now far more accustomed to displaying her nude body to others, so when the hands that washed her covered every inch, including soaping her breasts and running a soft cloth between the valley of her buttocks and the fragile indent of her slit, she was not motivated to protest.

After she had been cleansed, her companions dressed her in a simple white blouse and modest knee-length cotton skirt. Both garments were light enough to allow easy movement and having not been given either a bra or a pair of knickers to slip on underneath, Aurelia felt acutely aware of her vulnerability beneath the outer shell of her clothing. Despite the absence of any other stimulation, her nipples hardened as soon as they brushed against the stiff fabric of her shirt and below she felt deliciously bare without the cover of underwear.

Madame Denoux appeared the moment that her washing and wardrobe attendants had retired. She was accompanied by Florence, the woman who had been working on the reception desk the previous day, who was now wearing a black and white French maid’s outfit and carrying a lightweight table and chair set and a basket full of gardening equipment.

Florence had been tasked with the initial stage of her training, Madame Denoux explained, as the other woman busied herself setting up the equipment, displaying regular flashes of thigh each time she bent over and her short frilled skirt rode up to expose her stocking tops.

‘My partner or I will return regularly,’ Madame Denoux explained, ‘and you will be expected to report back to us regarding each task and aspect of your development. Your thoughts, feelings, and so on. Any questions you might have. And don’t bother to hold anything back,’ she added by way of warning, ‘we will know.’

‘If you already know how I feel, then why should I bother to tell you anything at all?’ Aurelia responded with no small degree of irritation.

‘Because talking will help you to understand.’

She was left with Florence, who explained in painstaking detail how to care for the red and white petalled Bonsai tree that had been her gift on arrival from her two trainers, along with all of the other plants in the garden.

‘Gardening?’ Aurelia asked incredulously. ‘That’s my training?’

‘It is not my position to answer questions,’ Florence responded.

Each piece of equipment that she had been provided with was ridiculously small, like something that Alice might have brought back from the Mad Hatter’s garden in Wonderland. The watering can was the size of a teacup, so Aurelia was forced to refill it over and over again. The pruning shears were no larger than a pair of nail scissors so that trimming a hedgerow was a painfully slow and frustrating process.

She spent her first few days consumed by irritation and mind-numbing boredom and she wished that Madame Denoux or the nameless Miss Greysuit would finally show up as they had promised so that she could give them a piece of her mind, but neither woman materialised and Aurelia was left alone besides the company of her bathing companions each day and the presence of the plants that she tended.

By the third or fourth day the irritable humming of her mind quietened. Time slowed. She began to look forward to her morning and evening hygiene ritual purely for the human contact that her attendants provided and she also craved the time that she spent gardening because it was the only activity that she had been granted and the only period of time when she was allowed the benefit of sight.

She was even fed blind. At first Aurelia found allowing another to put food into her mouth as if she were a child a frustrating, humiliating and fearful experience. Her arms and hands felt useless by her side and yet she could not seem to help instinctively lifting them up to her mouth each time she sensed another spoonful of mystery food approaching her lips. She recognised few of the flavours that she imbibed. Whatever they were feeding her, it was not anything she would usually eat.

There were light soups that tasted of rosewater and tiny spongy cakes that smelled of lychee and dissolved into foam on her tongue and a thick, dark liquid that fizzed as it ran down her throat.

Each meal carried with it particular qualities and once Aurelia began to trust the unknown hands that fed her, her attention shifted to the changes in her body and mood brought on by each meal. Her breakfasts made her feel more alive than ever before and her suppers relaxed her and prepared her for sleep.

As soon as she began to find comfort in the act of receiving sustenance directly from her attendants, they disappeared and instead a dog bowl was pushed in front of her from which she was expected to lap. Rebellion rose within her immediately. How many people were watching her behave like a common animal? Aurelia wondered. Were they laughing? But she obediently lowered her head to the bowl and tentatively stuck out her tongue until she tasted a stew that was both sweet and salty, like licorice. Eventually, eating this way too became normal.

She noticed pomegranate was absent from the menu and no matter how relaxing a stupor was brought on by the warm, spicy drinks that were given to her before bed, she still spent her nights shifting restlessly under the covers and enthralled by her memories of Andrei. Often the burning sensation of the heart on her cunt would wake her and she would discover that she had orgasmed in her sleep.

Days and nights continued to slip away. She had no idea how many. Further tattoos appeared on her flesh, even without the benefit of any sexual contact besides the orchestra of her own fingertips expertly playing across her clitoris.

When her mind fell idle, she often thought of Siv and where she might be now. Still with the Ball? With Walter? Travelling?

Also unbidden came disturbing thoughts of Tristan and his ambiguous attraction, which she wanted to banish but was unable to do, evocations of him battling with her memories of Andrei in her waking dreams.

One morning, as she was lost in the beauty of the red and white petals unfurling, a trio of pale-pink buds bloomed across the underside of her unmarked wrist. On another day, as she was enjoying the attentions of her bathing attendants, she felt a familiar burning sensation on her calf and looked down to see the image of a bird in flight slowly appearing just below her knee.

Still, Madame Denoux and Miss Greysuit did not come to listen to her reflections and she took to analysing her every physical and mental response within the isolation of her own mind.

Though her attendants oversaw her comfort scrupulously, she often had the urge to open her eyes, far more than she ever did when blindfolded. Perhaps, she mused, that was because the choice to follow this instruction was now overtly hers. She hadn’t had her sight removed, she had chosen to remove it, and fighting her natural instinct to see was much harder than simply agreeing to keep a blindfold on. Over time, though, she became used to keeping her eyes closed when instructed and eventually she began to feel as though her lids were weighted and she could not have opened them at an inappropriate time even if she had wanted to.

Then, out of the blue, one morning, she was informed she was being granted a day off, and would do so at regular intervals from now onwards and was allowed to walk out of the building into the thin rain that always seemed to cocoon the city of Seattle.

Her old clothing was loaned back to her for the occasion and the fresh aroma of sea air proved invigorating and disorienting. But with her eyes open again, everything around her now appeared grey and the city had few immediate charms.

Once she had mastered the art of voluntary blindness, her first night-time visitor arrived on the night of her first wet amble outside.

Time seemed meaningless now, but Aurelia felt as though weeks had passed since she had last made love to Andrei and her body responded instinctively to the touch of the firm hand that slid beneath the covers and cupped each of her breasts in turn before circling her nipples and then venturing further south with such deliberate languor that by the time the hand reached her cunt, Aurelia’s insides felt sodden and she spread her legs wide apart without any further encouragement.

A finger slipped inside her and a long body pressed itself against hers. The body did not belong to Andrei. This man was leaner and totally hairless. He tasted different too; of fresh cigarette smoke masked with mint. His cock was long and thin and so hard that it throbbed, and when Aurelia wrapped her hand around it to ease the pressure of his arousal with her touch, she imagined that she could feel his heart beating beneath her fingers.

He was slow and gentle with her, perhaps knowing that he was the first of the strangers who would visit her room as part of her training. When their bodies joined, they fitted together as easily as a wave merging back with the sea, as if they had made love many times before.

He remained religiously silent throughout, his actions speaking for him.

He was the first of many men and women who fucked her within the glass-walled confines of her training room in the Network’s headquarters.

The next night three lovers visited her, one after the other, and the night after that a group of men climbed into her bed together, ripping the covers away from her still-sleeping body, pulling up her nightdress and entering her so quickly that the first thrust felt like part of a dream. She almost instinctively opened her eyes when the light switch was flicked on and a sliver of brightness assaulted her eyes, but managed to keep them closed as she had been instructed and so could not be sure whether there were three, four, five or even more. There was just a tangle of arms and legs and cocks and hands that stroked her or grabbed her or lifted her up by the hair and pushed her face onto an erect penis or spread her thighs wide apart to aid the passage of whoever planned to penetrate her next.

The experience of being used by so many simultaneously was deeply relaxing for Aurelia. After so many quiet days spent doing nothing but bathing, sleeping, wandering the Seattle streets or trimming the leaves of her Bonsai, her mind was in a semi-permanent state of relaxation and now being consumed by a multitude of dominant sex partners seemed entirely natural to her.

She did not need to think about anything at all, not even where she should next position any one of her limbs, because the men and women who had entered her bed simply moved her as if she were a lifeless doll who existed purely to give them pleasure.

Free from the mental distraction of thought and not even aware of who was fucking her, Aurelia was living through her nerve endings. Every touch of another’s skin brushing against her own, every firm squeeze of her nipples, every thrust that filled her to the brim, seemed ten times more acute than any sensation she had ever experienced in what felt like a whole other life before. Everything became defined by before and after she had encountered the Ball.

When a man gently tipped her head back and helped her to take a sip of water from a glass, she imagined that she could feel each droplet pearling over her tongue and down her throat. The same man laid her tenderly back onto the bed and dropped his head to her cunt and lapped at her, licking her firmly but slowly, then twisting and flicking his tongue in a series of precise geometric patterns that orchestrated the rise of her arousal perfectly.

When she came, all of the tattoos on her body burst into life and burned so fiercely it was as if she did not exist at all besides in the patterns of the marks that seared her flesh.

When they finally left her, she fell immediately back into a deep and contented slumber. It was not until morning that her conscious thoughts returned and with them feelings of fear, guilt and shame.

The lights in the pagoda were as bright as stage lamps and the rest of the garden pitch-black in the darkness and Aurelia knew that every moment of the night’s excesses would have been distinctly visible to anyone located nearby.

Had Andrei been watching? If he had been, what would he have seen? Unbidden images appeared in her mind as if she had been him, viewing the scene from outside her own body. The expression on her face transforming into a mask of exquisite pleasure with the onset of each new lover inside her. The curve of lips as her mouth opened to cry out when she orgasmed. The way that she had so eagerly allowed the men to shift her into whatever position they desired and had pressed her hips forward or back as if she were performing the mating dance of an animal to ease their passage.

Her body had been changed too. Thin tattooed bracelets now wound around each of her wrists and ankles. A length of delicate white pearls decorated the narrow circumference of her waist. Even if she could erase the sex acts that she had performed from her mind, she would not be able to erase them from her body. It appeared the Ball was painting its master opus across her skin.