Mistress of Night and Dawn (37 page)

She opened her eyes.

Andrei’s eyes were piercing, fixed on her. He was also naked, but wore a spectacular mask of peacock feathers that made him look like a king or a priest, she thought.

Already an earthquake was in motion and her heart felt it was dancing an animated, frenzied tango inside her chest, every tantalizing thrust catapulting her to a new, dizzying, higher level of sensation. Her breath grew short as the hum of the crowd rose to deafening proportion and her mind clouded.

Behind the ceremonial mask, Aurelia knew Andrei was smiling at her.

She smiled back.

On and on Andrei fucked her against the inchoate music of the congregation until she was just a mind and a body, both striving for holy transcendence.

Then Andrei bucked suddenly, as if electrified, and with one final, powerful thrust he advanced deeper forward to seemingly previously unfathomed depths inside her and she felt the fire of him beating like a wave inside her, bathing her in terrible warmth, burning her. And the path of the fire spreading at the speed of light through every vein in her body.

Aurelia roared with pleasure.

Andrei sighed.

The hum of the crowd fell.

Now she looked up at the man she loved and saw him catching his breath and throwing the mask to the ground, unveiling the luxuriant dark curls against which early rays of morning light stumbled.

She felt a tear she could not control run down her cheek.

He put his hand forward to pull her up. Initially she thought the strength of the orgasm she had just experienced had drained all the reserves of strength in her body, but his hand reached hers and she pulled herself up with an energy she never knew she had. Aurelia stood, let go of Andrei’s hand.

She felt . . . new.

Strong.

Invincible.

At the front of the crowd she saw Siv, who was looking at her with awe in her eyes. As were all the other members of the Ball.

Aurelia straightened her back, adjusted her stance, legs slightly apart for balance.

‘It’s dawn,’ Andrei said.

Aurelia felt an uncommon energy racing through her naked, exposed body. But also a tremendous sense of peace.

She looked down and her breath caught in her throat. Between every previous tattoo, word, sign and image, a network of branches, like poison ivy, was moving, like a film unrolling in slow motion, over the surface of her pale skin or what was left of it to see . . . It looked truly alive, animating her illustrated surface. And, inexorably, the animated tendrils began to join every tattoo to each other, inch by inch, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, word by word, sentence by sentence.

It was completing her.

Finally, the Inking ceased and she was fully illustrated. From the collar on her neck to the thin bracelet of sharp green leaves bordering her ankles.

Dawn broke.

Her body was outlined against the rising sun in the Ball’s garden, a thing of incomparable beauty, and to the admiration of the audience, Aurelia looked as if she was on fire.

The Ball finally had a new Mistress.

Several years later, after the snows of winter had melted and the welcome warmth of spring had settled on the land and sea, the Ball arrived in the city.

It was a city once fabled in mythology and legend, beyond the desert and the steppes of Central Asia, and it had taken the Ball many months to reach its destination, its fleet of anonymous vehicles, trailers, lorries and sleek transportation roaring down the highways like a modern caravan, having assembled shortly after Christmas in a busy port by the China Sea, under the guise of a travelling circus. Andrei was in charge of the complicated logistics of the operation and revelled in the role, now that the function of Protector was to some extent superfluous since Aurelia had taken on the mantle of Mistress of the Ball.

It was Aurelia who now selected the destinations and the annual theme, although in truth the two of them conferred a lot and it had become more of a close collaboration, with the Network providing reliable administrative and financial support for the operation, once a consensus had been reached. Back in Seattle, the back-up operation was now led by Miss Morris and Madame Denoux, two women of experience and wisdom Aurelia fully trusted, who had both agreed to return to the headquarters at Aurelia’s request, and were ably assisted by Florence.

The previous year’s Ball had, despite obvious difficulties due to its remote and often perilous setting, been in everyone’s opinion an outstanding success. The Amazon forest had liberated the imagination of the organisers and participants tenfold and it was generally viewed as one of the greatest balls to have been held in a generation. Which only made the next one even more of a challenge.

As a child, Aurelia had been something of a bookworm and now had full leisure to call on her sense of wonder and the books in which she had formed an idea of the world. There had always been something magical about Samarkand, a name and a place evocative of the
Thousand and One Nights
, and she was determined to make this Ball even more memorable.

It was to be themed on
Alice In Wonderland
, a prospect which opened up so many wonderful possibilities, devious scenarios and exemplars of beauty, Aurelia felt. For months now she had often woken in the heart of the night with her imagination unbound and exciting visions racing through her brain as she assembled the details of what she wished to organise and lead.

The followers of the Ball – the court of love, the guild of worshippers – had been travelling towards Samarkand, by sea, land and air ever since the word had got out. Some were rich, others were poor, some looked like accountants, office or factory workers while many were extravagant in appearance or behaviour, but to unknown observers they somehow didn’t stand out from the crowd.

Alongside them came the dancers, the acrobats, the clowns even, the contortionists, the wonderful freaks, the seamstresses, the animal and body tamers, the whip masters, the beautiful and the damned, the holy performers, the caterers, the maids-in-waiting and the studs, the cage-makers, the light artists, the water crew, the painters and sculptors in metal, flesh and colours, and the whole retinue of those who lived for lust and love and joy.

To Samarkand they came in search of beauty and the glorious ecstasy that would be reached on the stroke of dawn.

On a recce the previous year, Andrei and Aurelia had selected the grounds on which the Ball would take place, just a few miles outside the city itself and discreet enough to afford the Ball enough privacy for its activities, and initial construction had begun in preparation for the event.

Following the Ball’s arrival, the rehearsals began, overseen by Siv and Tristan, who managed to work together despite the fire inherent in both of their natures. Walter had retired after the last British Ball and now tended his garden on the English south coast, which Aurelia found ironic seeing that the place had been the departure point for her new life and she could never envisage returning there herself. But she had a smile on her face when she pictured Walter sculpting his flowers and elaborately shaped bushes and moving between them on the wings of scent and touch alone.

Everything was now ready and the Ball was just days away. As she looked into Andrei’s face, like every year at this time, she couldn’t help but notice the thin veil of melancholy clouding his eyes as he gazed at her, like a little boy lost, a softness inside him that so rarely expressed itself and was in such marked contrast to his manly, almost masterful, appearance, the hard chin and mass of dark curls, the swimmer’s gait of his broad shoulders, the steady rhythm of his muscles under his skin.

‘You mustn’t,’ Aurelia said.

‘I know,’ Andrei said and looked away briefly, his mind visibly torn, yet again, by the unassailable certainty of her deep love for him and the knowledge that others would touch her, fuck her, use her, worship her, at the Ball. As the tradition dictated. And only after the night had unrolled with its dizzy flow of excesses and pleasure would she fall into his arms again, carrying the scent of so many others, men and women, strangers and friends, infusing her flesh, inside and out, and she would finally find peace again in his embrace. Together they had chosen to disregard many of the Ball’s traditions, but not this one.

‘It is the way . . .’

For a fraction of a second, as she noted his sorrow, Aurelia understood why her parents had eloped from the Ball, unable to accept the idea that they could share their bodies with others.

But she also knew that Andrei would not love her as much as he did were she not the Mistress of the Ball. It was what tied them, held them together. The tradition, the inheritance of centuries of human pleasure.

It was what she had been born for.

‘It is the way . . .’

Her whole life led to this.

This one night of the year.

Of ultimate pleasure.

Celebrating sex.

Celebrating life.

A smile returned to Andrei’s face.

‘You look so beautiful tonight. The quintessence of the Ball, my very dear Mistress.’

The shadows lifted from Aurelia’s mind and she was overcome by a tide of tenderness for him, her man, her husband, her partner. For better or for worse.

And as every single invisible tattoo painted on her body began to pulse in readiness, she felt another small fire warming the pit of her stomach, and looked Andrei in the eyes and told him something she had been holding back for a few days now, waiting for the right moment, but knowing it should be before the Ball.

‘I’m expecting a child,’ Aurelia said.

Andrei’s face lit up.

She watched him melt, a teardrop swelling below his right eye before it ran gracefully down his cheek.

‘Oh . . . Aurelia . . .’

‘It’s going to be a girl. I know it. Everything inside me is telling me so.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘And I want to call her Alice,’ Aurelia said as Andrei took her in his arms.

‘The next Mistress of the Ball,’ he whispered, holding her body against his, hoping to freeze this moment in time, encased in amber.

‘Possibly,’ Aurelia said. ‘That will have to be her decision.’

The early morning sun was drifting through the slants in the trailer window. Outside, the tents were dotted across the desert sands like flowers of colour.

Tonight Aurelia would stand, the centre of attraction, flesh made flesh, her body on fire, with every magical illustration fully incandescent, her light a blessing for the activities about to begin and she would say the words: ‘Let the Ball begin.’

As ever, we’d like to thank our intrepid agent Sarah Such for her grand efforts on our behalf, as well as Rosemarie and Jessica Buckman who reign over our foreign rights front with talent and bravura.

In addition it’s fair to say that this novel would not exist without the belief and encouragement of Jon Wood, Jemima Forrester, Susan Lamb, Mark Rusher and Jo Carpenter at our UK publishers Orion, and the valiant support of Christian Rohr and Linda Walz at Carl’s Books in Germany.

Our other overseas publishers are too numerous to mention, but we are immensely grateful to have been invited onto their lists and become part of their family of authors.

Inspiration for this book stems from many sources, some of which we are aware of and others which percolated for years in our subconscious minds. They say that ‘you are what you eat’ and each romantic and erotic book and film that we passed in the night (and day . . .) can probably find an echo in these pages, along with a myriad of other influences as varied as the streets of London and sometimes as fleeting as the glance of a passing stranger who caught our eye for a moment and our imaginations for much longer. We hope our readers forgive our strange cocktail, a highly personal blend of ambiguous autobiography and sometimes perverse imagination and savour it with the same appetite that aroused us when we wrote the story and created its characters, until they felt so real to us!

One half of Vina Jackson owes a special thank you, as ever, to her employer for unending support and providing the best (non-writing) job in London, along with her colleagues who (totally unaware of the reason!) cover her frequent absences from work whilst she is glued to a different keyboard on another side of town. Thank you to Stephen Sallinger for kindly allowing use of his home ‘The Chapel’ within these pages; to TJMW for Persephone, reigning in my historical flights of fancy, and inspiration; to PB, for giving me pomegranate; and to Matt Christie, for being there right from the start, and the photos. Finally – this one’s for Aurelie De Cognac. Happy Birthday – I’m sorry it’s a year late.

While the other half of our two-headed writing creature wishes to profusely thank Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, John Irving, Angela Carter and Anne Desclos aka Dominique Aury aka Pauline Reage (all with mild apologies for the borrowings and profound inspiration). And, on a personal note, DJ whose husband was borrowed for long periods in the interest of the cause, SN for the writing on her skin and AH who supplied an essential body for the delectation of the eyes and senses.

We’d also like to add a note of caution and make it clear that our Aurelia is in no way connected to the dynamic Aurelia Szewczuk, press maven at our French publishers Bragelonne/Milady whom we only met for the first time long after the creation of our Mistress-in-Waiting . . .

And finally, a warm-hearted nod of appreciation to all our other family and friends without whom . . .

Vina Jackson

Author photo ©
www.mattchristie.com