Mistress of Night and Dawn (32 page)

She could have watched these creatures endlessly, knowing that they appeared to be floating free from the burden of any kind of harness or suspension device, but she was aware that she and Iris were expected in the kitchens, so continued onward, still following the whale song down to the shore line.

At first, the beach appeared to be empty. But as her eyes adjusted to the rapidly dimming light, Moana realised that what she had at first thought were rocks were in fact people clad in a skin-tight, silvery-grey and glistening fabric and curled up on the sand as still as corpses so that they resembled sleeping seals. As the young women approached, two of the grey creatures unfurled and stood to greet them. They were women, or at any rate they both had large breasts and erect nipples that were so prominent Moana found it difficult to meet their eyes as they spoke.

‘Welcome,’ the women said in unison, before taking both Moana and Iris by the hand and leading them a hundred yards further down the beach to a screen of ferns, which appeared from the outside to be a flat covering over a cliffside. But as they approached, the canopy of plants parted like a pair of curtains, revealing a high-ceilinged tunnel, as wide as a roadway. The sides of the tunnel were lined with lit candles, which stood in hollowed-out skulls set into the rock. Whether human, another animal or realistic fakes, Moana wasn’t sure, but the effect was more restful than ominous. It made her feel as though she were stepping into another world as she followed the dimly lit pathway through to the vast network of caves within.

Music reverberated so loudly through the rock walls that when Moana ran her fingertips along the damp stone, she could feel vibrations as if she were inside a giant, beating heart. She caught only fleeting glimpses of the Ball’s guests through openings that they bypassed on their way to the kitchen and the sights that caught her eyes were so bizarre she could not be sure whether she was here at all or if this was all part of some elaborate and mad dream.

Like the two attendants who escorted them and the acrobats who flew over the clifftops outside, the revellers were not properly garbed but seemed to be painted in such a way that their skin appeared almost transparent, as if they were ghosts; travellers who had already been to the afterlife and returned. They were unashamedly naked and some of them were joined in passionate embrace, a tangle of arms and legs and a corresponding cacophony of moans that were sometimes an utterly human expression of pleasure and at other times like the otherworldly cries of angels or demons. Iris caught Moana’s hand and pulled her into an embrace, kissing her briefly on the lips. ‘It’s incredible,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so glad we came.’

They were ushered into the kitchens and were unceremoniously undressed before being ordered to bathe – not just their hands were to be washed but their entire bodies – and they did so in a shower area that resembled an underground waterfall set into the rock wall. Then they were provided with filmy dresses that served as aprons and were shown to their work stations.

Moana was given the task of assembling brightly coloured sugar flowers. She was assigned a mountain of pre-made petals in every hue of the rainbow and shades unknown and required to turn them into sprays of blossoms. The recipe card that served as an instruction manual did not contain the necessary steps to accomplish such a feat, but rather advised her that she should concentrate on evoking a mood of longing in order to fill the dessert and all who ate it with desire. With Iris squeezing cut mango, strawberries and banana between her bare hands on a bench in front of her and the curve of her buttocks and small of her back visible beneath the sheer smock that she wore, this was no difficult task.

The hours passed quickly and hypnotically, leaving Moana with no idea as to how many blooms she had actually created because as soon as she had finished a bunch, a white-gloved attendant would appear and whip her handiwork away on a silver tray to be consumed by the hungry guests. Eventually they were relieved of their duties and instructed to bathe and change again in preparation for the ceremony. They had been working all night and it was now nearly dawn. Before bathing they were given a plate of food. There were perfumed jellies in the shape of skeletons and flavoured with coconut, jam-filled pastries so light that they crumbled to pieces if Moana squeezed them too hard between her thumb and forefinger, a thin and bright purple soup that was supposedly carrot, but tasted of blueberry, and for each of them a bunch of the crimson flowers that bloomed on the Pohutukawa tree that Moana had fashioned with her own hands and a glass of the juice that Iris had squeezed.

The strange supper fed the hunger pangs that had arisen in their stomachs but left them with a new type of hunger, a longing for each other that raged so fiercely they barely made it back beneath the water spout of the shower before they set upon one another. Moana half carried Iris to the bathing area and in front of half a dozen other kitchen attendants she lifted her friend’s skirts up to her waist, fell down to her knees on the wet floor and buried her face between Iris’s legs.

The sound of Iris’s moans was not dulled by the heavy trickle of the water that surrounded them and served only to urge Moana on. Her arms began to ache from the effort that it took to hold them and Iris’s dress up around her hips. Her knees began to hurt on the rock floor but she ignored every discomfort. It was nothing in comparison to the joy that she took from orchestrating her friend’s pleasure, running her tongue over Iris’s sensitive flesh, flicking the tip over her nub, worshipping each crevice and fold as if she was a chalice that held the sweetest wine.

Moana could barely breathe as Iris wound her fingers through Moana’s hair and held her firmly against her, pushing Moana’s nose into her entrance and riding her face until she shuddered in orgasm and collapsed into her friend’s arms.

Immediately they were both lifted and carried by a dozen hands who took them to one side, dried them, and with deft strokes painted every inch of their bodies in glittering silver so that they each resembled slivers of moonbeam or spirits.

Iris was smiling and laughing as gleefully as a child and Moana felt as though she was drunk.

‘Dawn is coming . . . the ceremony . . .’ whispered voices who urged them on and they blended into a flow of shining bodies exiting from the underground caverns and moving through the tunnels towards the beach and the growing light of day.

The sand was cool and soft beneath Moana’s feet and she nearly stumbled, thrown off balance by the change of texture underfoot. They had emerged from the curtain of ferns and joined the congregation of revellers who gathered by the shoreline, all of them naked and all of them shining like a shoal of fish that had inadvertently stepped out of the sea and onto dry land.

They were all staring in the same direction and some were cheering and crying out, ‘Mistress, Mistress . . .’ Moana turned her head and gasped when she saw the carriage moving towards them. A woman was sitting upright on a chair that had been made from the bones of a whale and was being carried on the shoulders of half a dozen men who were a head taller and twice as muscular as any man Moana had seen before.

She was painted, but pure white rather than silver and in such a way that every bone beneath her skin was highlighted so that she appeared half angel and half flesh. Besides the paint, she wore an elaborate costume of feathered wings that moved in and out from the centre of her spine as if they were not a costume at all but a part of her.

The crowd stepped back, formed a circle, and the woman was laid down in their centre. She spread her arms and legs like a crucifixion and, for a moment, Moana felt she might laugh as the pose reminded her of afternoons spent on the beach as a child, laying on her back and moving her limbs up and down to create the impression of a flying creature in the sand. An eerie silence fell over the congregation and the only sound was the steady lapping and crashing of the waves behind them.

A man stepped from the audience. His hair was jet black and his body fit. His cock stood erect, proud, aloft, like a compass pointing north.

Just as the sun began to rise over the sea, the man fell to his knees in front of the woman and she rose again and pushed him onto his back and then lowered herself onto his hardened flesh. As they were joined, her wings began to beat and the crowd began to cheer.

Moana cried out in astonishment as something moved over the woman’s body. Her flesh was no longer pale, but now covered with images that flashed as brightly as the sun’s rays roving over the sea. A landscape of spirals, hieroglyphs, creatures winged and land bound, fishes and reptiles etched across her flesh and all of them joined by a pulsing vine that wound around her entire body like a thin net joining them all together.

‘The inking,’ said voices alongside her reverently. ‘It is done.’

Aurelia threw open her dressing gown and looked at herself in the mirror. She had just sent PJ away on the pretext of needing some privacy. ‘Thinking time,’ she’d excused herself.

It was as if she had become a new person. Her body appeared leaner, stronger, more defined, underlying lines of increased power travelling like electric currents under her skin. There was no indication her hips were fuller or her waist any smaller than it had been previously, but the contrast in her outline was somehow sharper.

Unless she was mistaken, it had rained every single day outside her windows since she had been in Seattle, as well as during her rare daytime walks to Capitol Hill or the University District from her base in downtown, and her face now displayed all the pallor of a cartoon version of Snow White. Her eyes were automatically drawn to the areas where, in the right circumstances, the tattoos would regularly appear to both taunt and worry her slightly, unaccustomed as she still was to the language of lust – and the Ball – tracing a preordained path across the geometry of her body.

She closed her eyes and willed the images to appear. Her mind concentrating inexorably on memories of Andrei, sex, pleasure and the places and beds where their lovemaking had been given free rein. She tried to blank the world away and focus on recalling the ineffable sensations and the way her mind would invariably become divorced from her flesh and, at the same time, remain a captive part of it, a slave to instinct, animal desires, feral greed and the hunger within that craved to be fed by her being filled or exercising her will over others.

Her surroundings faded until she was just an antenna for a myriad neuronal stimuli, an empty vessel floating in space, calling for the flame to move nearer and consume her in its fire.

It felt like floating in space.

Free.

Feather light.

Complete.

She opened her eyes again.

She had willed them all back and heat rose inside her.

She contemplated the many marks, the images, the symbols, the drawings scattered across the horizon of her skin.

The palette of incandescent hearts, the collars and bracelets etched deep under her epidermis, the tree leaves, the wandering branches like snakes now encircling her pubis in a protective cocoon, the eyes, the hieroglyphs and sigils spreading along her flank, the words in languages she could not decipher drawn in a straight line on the underside of her breasts, the Chinese dragons lounging across the seat of her shoulders.

She turned round and peered at the taut expanse of her back. Graceful patterns crisscrossed its canvas, while lines of leaves intertwined with flowers danced down her flanks. She felt like an unsigned masterpiece.

Day by day, night by night, partner by unknown partner, fucked and fucking, controlled and controlling, experiencing bliss and pain and inflicting pleasure and possibly even greater pain when gripped in the storm of lust, she had become illustrated.

She blinked once and then twice, and as if she had given a signal, a command, the network of images adorning her body from neck to ankles disappeared in a flash. She could now control the power, Aurelia realised. Another step down the road. To what?

She threw aside the dressing gown and walked into the shower stall. Soon, she knew either Madame Denoux or the poised, nameless woman with the short-cropped grey hair would walk into her suite of rooms and proceed with the usual interrogation and ask her to offer her impressions on the latest session in the most minute of details, to help her focus on the way her body and heart had reacted. Yet again she would initially be lost for words until the something clicked, as it always did, and she relived the moment in every exquisite slow motion shard. Language would flow from her lips, words become flesh, skin become emotion until the relating of the often excruciating moments where lust had metamorphosised into transcendence no longer required speech and she found herself vibrating inside to the sound of her own voice and she could observe the wry smile of recognition and approval playing on the women’s lips.

She had so often wanted to ask either of the older women supervising her training whether the responses she was evoking were right and proper, or if she was making progress, but that common, wry smile would never change, just a sparkle in their eyes providing a hint of a verdict before they nodded like ancient sages and left her alone to her day, to relax and prepare for the next session, or ordeal.

Aurelia had asked Madame Denoux about the many images she was sporting, but the woman declined to answer.

‘How are the tattoos made? Is it a sort of invisible ink?’ Aurelia had persisted.

The older woman had sighed.

‘No, Aurelia. It’s in your blood. You were born a Mistress-in-Waiting. It’s the way the Ball works.’

‘But I’ve seen others with a similar heart to mine on the underside of their wrist. Andrei, Tristan, sometimes when my eyelids opened a little during my training on the arms of others. But I also noted that was the only image they appeared to display on their body, not all those I now have. How come?’

‘Because you are destined to be the Ball’s Mistress. They are just servants of the Ball. It is what it is.’