Free Mistress of Night and Dawn by Vina Jackson Page A

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.