by Vina Jackson
‘Hey, careful with that thing,’ he shouted. ‘I know how good your aim is.’
‘I missed you on purpose,’ she replied, as he bent down to pick up the shaft that had landed just short of his car.
Aurelia rarely travelled by car. Her godparents, both committed environmentalists, refused to own one, preferring to cycle or take the train everywhere. She quickly fell into a doze as the busy streets disappeared behind them and began to murmur and twitch as her mind filled with shadows, unnoticed by Siv and Ginger who were both lost in the heavy dubstep beat playing on the stereo.
She started with a cry when Siv shook her.
‘We’re here, honey. Are you okay?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Aurelia replied, forcing a smile. Her sense that she was being watched had grown stronger, and now she had the feeling that her dreams were also being invaded. Clearly the events of the past few months had begun to addle her brain.
Her lips were dry. She passed her tongue across them and tasted pomegranate.
And remembered the kiss.
France 1788
Unrest was spreading fast across the country as the inequalities in French society had begun tearing at its social fabric.
The Ball Council had initially planned to set the celebrations in a small castle, just an hour’s ride from Paris, owned by a relative of one of the Council members, but influential advisers at the king’s Court had suggested a more distant location might prove more suitable so as not to draw too much attention. They had settled on a property in the south situated by the river downstream from Avignon’s ruined bridge. It was the summer residence of a distant cousin of the royal family and had been put at the full disposal of the Council, with all its attending servants given leave for several weeks and replaced by Ball functionaries so that a necessary veil of secrecy could be drawn on what would happen there.
It was both sufficiently isolated and opulent, its grounds bordered by high walls crawling with vines and other hot-weather vegetation, that the influx of visitors, performers, guests and set-up workers would not be unduly noticed in the nearby town during the course of the necessary preparations for the big night.
Some months ahead, Oriole had been brought to Avignon and installed in the house of Ball sympathisers, a stone’s throw from the imposing bulk of the Palais des Papes, and her training and grooming had intensified in preparation for the night of the autumn equinox when, as part of its annual ritual immemorially set on a day when day and night were the same length, the Ball would take place.
The legend persisted to this day that this tradition went all the way back to ancient Egypt and the times of Cleopatra, but no one now involved with it truly knew the origins of the Ball, whether it had begun as a religious ritual initiated by rogue priests in one of the many temples scattered across the deserts or as a heathen, pagan celebration of quite another nature.
Whenever Oriole was not being prepared for the Ball, she spent her free time embroidering or playing the harpsichord. In both of these enterprises, she had countless instructors, and like the shadowy, mostly silent, folk who supervised her around the house and the clock for the fateful day which was fast approaching, they were invariably masked. It was a matter of intense frustration to Oriole that none of these attendants ever allowed themselves to grow close to her in any way, beyond the essential communication of instruction, advice and education. She felt lonely, her childhood and the whole life she had enjoyed before she had been chosen fading into distant memories.
From the day of her arrival here she had been ordered always to dress in her best finery; heavy dresses with elaborate embroidery and gold stitching, tight corsets seizing her waist in a vice and forcing her to stand straight at all times, even at leisure. Her hair fell across her shoulders in a shower of gold ringlets which took the servants hours every morning to arrange after the hundred and more strokes of the brush she swept through her hair before she went to bed the previous evenings.
It was as if she was constantly on show, about to be presented at court. The tight leather ankle boots she also had to wear on a permanent basis were an inconvenience, elegant but uncomfortable. There were days when, if left to her own devices, she would have so much preferred to gambol around on bare feet, her tall, elongated frame liberated from all its restrictions, her slight breasts unconfined.
Why would they not answer all the insidious questions that were nagging at her mind? Why had her parents consented to the whole enterprise and delivered her into the hands of the Ball’s attendants?
Her nights were full of strange and disturbing dreams the shape of which she had never experienced before, as if something in the food or drink she was being given was manipulating her thoughts, directing them into new, previously unfathomable directions. Oriole would wake in the early hours of morning, sweat still wetting the collar of her nightshirt, images of ice, fire and raging suns still bright in her mind, her thoughts running frantically in circles, losing contact with the comfort of reality.
But there was seldom time enough to catch her breath or dwell on the images and swirls of terror of the night, before the morning attendants would invariably enter her chamber and wordlessly pull the covers away, undress her, bath her, feed her, dress her in her now customary uniforms of gold and silk, billowing folds and delicate white stockings that reached to halfway up her creamy thighs, and escort her to the rooms where the training took place. And she had to concentrate again on every element of the ritual.
And day followed day.
Until the equinox.
Oriole had lost all sense of time and when she woke up that morning, her initial surprise was that it had unexpectedly proven a night empty of dreams, a welcome oasis of peace. She opened her eyes, squinted at the sunlight rushing through the half-open windows, realising someone had already pulled the heavy curtains apart. A shadow briefly obscured the light and her vision sharpened. The Matron, head of all the other attendants. Dressed in all her finery.
‘The day has come,’ the Matron said. ‘You must do us proud.’
Oriole blinked.
‘We’ve been told that the Marquis himself has designed this year’s ceremonial ritual. It’s a great honour,’ she continued.
Oriole had vaguely heard rumours of the Marquis. Not all favourable. Many said he was twisted and perverse.
‘Rise.’
The bed covers were pulled away and Oriole’s skin felt the clean caress of the morning breeze as it wound its way through the windows and awakened her senses. The sky outside was unbroken blue. She shivered briefly.
Under the gaze of the Matron and the masked attendants, she inelegantly crawled out of the bed. The moment she was on her feet, the silent women surrounded her and tugged at her night gown as she raised her hands to the ceiling to facilitate its removal.
She was led, naked, out of the door into the adjoining chamber where the copper bathtub stood at the centre of the room, coils of steam rising upward from its hot, perfumed contents. She carefully dipped a toe and tested that the heat was just on the right edge of warm and invigorating and her two legs willingly followed. Oriole closed her eyes and, with a shudder and an intake of breath, waited for the maids to pour the cleansing water over her shoulders and let it flow across the hills and valleys of her body.
As the two expert sets of hands proceeded to soap and massage the flow of water into her bare flesh, Oriole opened her eyes and saw the Matron examining her, in judgement, appraising the firmness of her nudity and the pleasing harmony of her curves, lines and pallor.
There was a shuffle, a movement behind, her and she heard another set of steps entering the chamber. She instinctively wanted to look round to see who it might be, but the Matron’s stern gaze drilled into her eyes, forbidding any attempt at movement. The stranger entered and she felt a hand cup her buttocks and then draw a line from the tip of her shoulders all the way down to the thin alley that parted her cheeks. Like a merchant assessing his merchandise. It must be a man’s hand. He co
ughed approvingly and turned her to face him as the maids wiped the final layer of soap away. It was her uncle, the man who had been appointed her custodian after her selection.
Oriole was shocked and briefly panicked, wanting to shield her breasts and sex from his view, but she knew that the regulations prohibited her from concealing any part of her nudity. She felt her face redden and a knot in her stomach clench.
Her uncle now stood next to the Matron, both of them watching her intently, silently, an ambiguous smile spreading across his thin lips. He wore his best wig and his military uniform, with the medals from the Spanish campaign.
The servants proceeded to dry her and she stood frozen under the steady, impersonal examination. Satisfied by her appearance, both her current guardians suddenly walked out, leaving her in the care of the busy maids who now proceeded to powder her body from neck to bottom, until she stood like a porcelain statue, her feet still loosely gripped by the now lukewarm water at the bottom of the copper tub.
A nudge to her shoulder indicated she should exit the bath and return to the bedroom where she was instructed to sit on a damask-print chair, still bare-bottomed, and another set of servants, their faces partly obscured by black domino masks, proceeded to brush her hair upwards until it looked like an almighty explosion of blond curls standing like a throne above her delicate features, puffed up with the help of lotions and cream into a bee’s nest of regal splendour, not unlike how the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, had appeared on that one occasion her parents had taken her to court a few years ago and she had set eyes on the monarch from half a room away.
The maids seemed to work in shifts, fine-tuning her appearance throughout the morning, layering her naked body with further white, fragrant powders until the fierce coats of snow felt like another skin, an evanescent form of clothing. She was fed rosewater syrup, but no actual food, and then they proceeded to rouge the tips of her breasts, and, after plucking her eyebrows into a perfect accent, the women then moved down to her sex and carefully shaped and trimmed the hair there.
Oriole abandoned herself to their ministrations, her mind wandering idly as she tried to distract herself, not thinking of the night that lay ahead, banishing the occasional stab of pain seizing her with every successive pluck in that delicate area of her intimacy.
She was handed a cup of aromatic tea and ordered to drink it.
‘This will help you sleep,’ she was told. Something she now craved for after the hours of cleansing and preparations, her whole body now painted, shaped, every single nerve attuned, expectant, vibrating somehow.
The beverage had a curious taste, Oriole realised, as she was gently carried to the bed and quickly fell into a deep sleep.
At the back of her mind, she knew that as night fell she had been lifted from her slumber, wrapped with warm and soft cloth and transported in a carriage across a short distance. All as if in a distant dream in which she was both herself and another.
She wiped the drowsiness from her eyes.
The stone hall was immense, illuminated by a concentric ring of torches burning bright all across its perimeter, shedding a flickering light on the spectacle unfolding below. She was sprawled across a velvet-covered divan placed on one of the balconies that overlooked the vast well. As sleep methodically ebbed away, Oriole felt a sharp, tight pressure stabbing both her nipples and, a moment later, her sex. She quickly parted the diaphanous silk robe wrapped around her body and, with a jolt of shock, noticed that she had been adorned in all her sensitive parts with small dark-orange stones. Amber, she realised. At first, she feared they had been forcibly pierced into her flesh but rapidly observed with a sigh of relief that they were actually attached by sharp clips that bit painfully into the skin where it was at its most delicate. They had never warned her about this.
As her senses gradually returned – how long had she slept? – Oriole concentrated on the pain as she had been taught and it slowly morphed into an alien form of pleasure, a deep sigh of satisfaction coursing from the tip of her breasts and sex, opening all the way down through the pit of her stomach and up to her chest, then her lips, and finally her mind, sharpening each nerve end in her body. She shuddered. Then she realised, with the garment wide open, that she was fully exposed. But no one below was looking at her and she was alone on the balcony. She pulled the material together. It was almost transparent anyway, and she knew this was no occasion for modesty. She was aware that her total nudity, later, was unavoidable. The weeks of training had readied her.
Music floated upwards from the well of the stone hall.
She raised herself, sat upright and looked down as the sound of musical instruments being tuned reached her ears.
In a far corner of the hall, a stage had been set up and a string quartet sat. To Oriole’s surprise, each of the musicians was quite naked. She noticed that they all wore oriental-like flat slippers to shield their feet from the cold stone floor and then realised she was wearing the same. Her attention was inevitably drawn, at a distance, to the members of the two male musicians, darker than the rest of their bodies, dangling provocatively between their thighs, but too far from her to see clearly. Oriole stretched her upper body and leaned over to see better and watched as the tuning ceased and the musicians froze into position, the female cellist with luxuriant red hair clutching her heavy instrument between her thighs.
The sounds of the music began, the melody, foreign and initially unfamiliar, slow, soothing her senses and cushioning the atmosphere with a cloak of seduction. It was nothing like the music that would normally be played at court, or in the parlours her parents frequented and sometimes took her to. It sounded slightly Oriental.
There was the muffled sound of dragging feet below and she rose from the divan and peered below the balcony. A dozen couples were shuffling their way across the floor, dancing, the women in extravagant pink skirts layered from the waist down like ruffled pyramids, the men in matching-coloured tight leggings. All wore nothing from the waist upwards aside from thin straps of material holding their garments up. Oriole drew her breath as she followed their hieratic movements, as they drew intricate patterns across the stone floor, a carefully designed geometry of courtship and ritual. One moment the couples were whirling wildly, hands, fingers making fleeting contact, and then the next they were separating and circling each other, like predators surveying their prey, almost mouth to mouth, breath to breath, before parting again. The sound of the music rose and the dance quickened.
Just then, the fog of sleep finally parted fully in Oriole’s mind and she remembered what was to happen first and what her part would be.
Out of nowhere, a masked servant appeared at her side, handing her a crystal glass full of wine. She brought it to her lips. It was heavy, earthy and, as it ran down her throat, sharp and heady. Once the liquid reached her stomach, the warmth inside became like a fire brewing slightly and the background pain of the bejewelled clamps began to morph into pleasure. The servant floated away and, once again, Oriole’s attention was drawn to the floor of the grand hall below.
The dancers moved languidly, but with every new phase appeared to be retreating towards the circle of the walls, leaving the centre of the hall empty.
A new woman broke through the line of the dancers and, step by step, moved to the centre of the circle they had gradually vacated. She was uncommonly tall compared to all the other dancers Oriole had been following with her gaze, covered from head to feet in a black, perilously thin silk loose gown that swam like moving water around her body, its waves shimmering with every movement she made. Once in her assigned position, she stood, her legs firmly apart, at the geometrical heart of the hall and raised her arms. Her face was lined but still incomparably beautiful, full of serenity and wisdom.
The musicians came to a halt, but stayed in place, now just spectators.
A door opened at the opposite end of the hall, which Oriole hadn’t previously noticed, the darkness of the wood blending effortlessly with the texture of the stone wa
ll. Six domino-masked servants trooped out onto the floor, escorting the imposing silhouette of a man. Even from her distant vantage point, Oriole could recognise the richness of his clothes. The gold threads, expensive materials and the sheer delicacy of the tailoring were equalled by the nobility of his bearing. He wore a crown on his veiled head, over his powdered wig. Surely this was heresy, Oriole briefly thought, only the King was allowed a crown. Then she noted the narrow crown was not made of gold or precious metal, but of wood, diminutive white flowers and leaves, like a pagan headdress, all its elements delicately woven together.
The man radiated power and strength, even though his face was concealed from view. He took position at the centre of the hall, facing the tall woman clad in black.
As he did so, Oriole saw a series of smaller doors opening, dotted across the circumference of the stone hall, and a multitude of folk streaming into the room, arranging themselves around the circle of the wall. Again, their clothes were exquisite and elaborate. She thought for a second she recognised her father and mother amongst them, but her attention was soon captured by the woman in black’s movements.
Her raised arms alighted on the man’s shoulders, as if blessing him, or greeting him.
On this signal, the six servants surrounded him like a shield of bodies and slowly began attending to him.
First, one of the girls stood on tiptoe and reverently picked up his crown and held it in place while another servant relieved him of the powdery white wig, and then the improvised crown was returned to his head. Throughout the operation, the veil obscuring his face was left untouched.
Yet another servant approached him and began undoing his collar and then his shirt and was succeeded by a servant who pulled it away from his body, uncovering a wool vest. A hush fell over the audience.
One of the serving women moved to face him, placing herself between the woman in black and the man and got down on her knees and applied herself to untying his breeches and ceremonially pulled them down, his immense cock springing to attention. Oriole’s heart stopped and she thought she heard muffled gasps from the spectators below.
