Omega (40 page)

Tonight, three days before the full moon, the coven talked together for an hour, and then Moira and Dan, Rosemary and Greg, withdrew to their own tents, while Sally took Diana for a walk by the river in the moonlight as a special late treat. As they watched the water, a fish jumped, and a minute later, a few metres downstream, another. The old woman and the child looked on, fascinated, while first one silver ring and then the other spread, shimmered, and disappeared into the eddies of the current.

'Magic Circles!' Diana whispered.

'Yes, darling. Magic Circles.'

On the day of the full moon, Camp Cerridwen heard a long unfamiliar sound; a motor vehicle coming up the logging road. When it rounded the bend they saw it was a big Dormobile motor caravan with four people in it. Dan was the first to recognize them and called out 'Fred! Jean!' excitedly as he ran towards them. Bi
g and grinning, Fred
Thomas braked and jumped out, with Jean behind him; then a shy-looking younger couple, Bruce and Sandie Peters, vaguely remembered as members of the Thomases' coven in Chertsey - the coven which had hived off from the Hassells' and had been invited, but refused, to go
with John and Karen to Savernake
Forest.

By now the rest of the Camp had come running, and after a babble of welcomes and introductions, Fred told Dan: 'They said in the village we'd find you up here.'

'But
driving,
for God's sake! Where did you get the petrol?'

'Oh, that,. . . We've been saving it. We've been holed up near Chipping Norton till the Madness was over, and ever since then we've been trying to pick you up. Tarot, I Ching, map-dowsing, the
lot
and getting nowhere. Then suddenly, three nights ago, Jean said she
knew.
Somewhere in these mountains, a forest near a lake. We thought it was Bala at first but she was positive it was somewhere around here. So we reckoned it was worth the last of our petrol and headed this way - then in Llanfyllin we picked up your trail from a family who said you'd saved their lives by telling their cousin in New Dyfnant about the vinegar masks. So here we are - and if there's a litre left in the tank, I'll be surprised. . . . May we stay? Have you room for us? We'll work hard.' He grinned again. 'I know I'm only a bloody-clerk but Bruce here is a builder. And both the girls are gardeners.'

'Room for you?' Moira smiled back. 'Look around - you bet there is. And I've a feeling you're only the first.'

18

‘I
f Mac sounds off once more about the evils of witchcraft,' Beaver grumbled, poking the fire viciously, 'I'll . . .'

'Yes, Beaver?
What
will you do?' Wally's question was crisp and sardonic and when he was crisp and sardonic he was dangerous.

Beaver moderated his voice. 'Just that his preaching's a bloody bore. We're clobbering witches, aren't we? - and doing all right out of it. Can't we just get on with it and manage without Mac's lectures?'

Wally poured himself a whisky. 'Let him talk. You don't have to listen'.'

'Easier said than done. He's got a voice like a dentist's drill.'

'All the same, you'll do it. Mac's our lifeline to Beehive. Where'd we be without that? No petrol dump, no ammo -we'd just be one more brigand group putting the fear of God into the locals. The couple of dozen we can reach in an hour's walk. No future in
that
because they've got nothing worth looting.'

'They've got some cattle and things.'

Wally laughed. T can just s
ee you settling down to a quiet
life milking Buttercup every morning.' He switched off the laugh and went on incisively: 'We are mobile and we have fire-power. They're the things that matter and it's Mac who supplies them. All
w
e
have to do is wave a Crusader banner for him. Personally, I don't give a damn if we
're clobbering witches or flat-e
arthcrs or guys with red hair. But it's witches we're paid for - in petrol, ammunition and other things. And that's worth a few boring speeches from Mac. He really
believes
in it. And he's ready enough to do his bit if a raid turns into a fight. So let him talk, if he wants to.'

Beaver sighed. 'I suppose
you're right. . . Tell you one
thing, though. Petrol and a
mmo are fine but here's the six
of us in a nice cosy man
or house and it's like a bloody
monastery. If Beehive re
ally wants to keep us happy why
don't they send us some women?'
r

'Poor deprived Beaver.' Wally regarded him thoughtfully. 'You have a point, though - some resident crumpet would be good for morale. It might even be able to cook.'

'There's Little Big Tits, at the mill. I could sort that man of hers with one hand.'

'For Christ's sake, Beaver - I've told you before. Foxes don't rob the farms they live on. So hands off the locals. We want 'em scared of us, sure - but not hell-bent on revenge. No aggro within five kilometres of base and that's an order.
Again.'

'It was just a thought.'

'I'll do the thinking around here.'

'Think me up a redhead, then.'

Wally was silent for a minute, then narrowed his eyes into the chilly smile that announced an idea. 'Would you mind if she was a witch ?'

'I'm not Mac. She can be a Confucian Methodist Jewess if she's built right. And preferably under eighteen.'

'Business and pleasure,' Wally mused. 'Two birds with one stone. Yes, why not ?'

'There's six of us,' Beaver pointed out. 'That means six birds not just two.'

'Fair enough. . . . Have you ever heard of Woodbury Croft? Well, I have. I keep my ears open, which is more than you do. And I've been saving that one up.'

Molly Andrews had looked at the sky, sniffed the air, tapped the barometer and decided it was not going to rain. 'Right, Jane. If you get Team A on to lifting onions, I'll take Team B for sowing summer cauliflowers - that'll be a quicker job, so when we've finished we'll come over and help your lot. Barbara, Team C on the cows.'

'Where are we storing the onions?' Jane Hooley asked, with her usual slightly anxious frown. The youngest of the three teachers, she was earnest and meticulous; the girls had teased her a good deal when she had first come to Woodbury Croft a year ago and Molly had wondered if she was going to prove suitable. But she had won the girls over by some indefinable alchemy of her own and the teasing had petered out.

'In the end garage, dear. Spread them on that long bench by the window, where the sun can dry them. If there are too many for the bench, we'll make some wire frames to extend it. . . . And, Barbara, see what you think about Snodgrass, will you? I'm not happy about him, and he's the only bull we've got till Peppy grows up. Hell, I wish we had a vet.'

They discussed Snodgrass's symptoms while the girls assembled in the gym for the morning briefing. Molly had been a teacher for twenty-three years, and Principal of Woodbury Croft for the past nine, and she was still both bewildered and exhilarated by finding herself, all of a sudden, more farmer than teacher, in charge of what she called 'this agricultural nunnery'. In the summer term there had been seven staff and ninety-three pupils; now there were only three staff and eighteen pupils. The crisis and the witch-hunt had hit the school badly, for Woodbury Croft was, in its modest way, as well known for its pagan orientation as Saffron Walden and Sidcot were for their Quakerism. Four out of five of the girls had come from witch families and Molly and her deputy Barbara Simms were both open witches. The non-witch girls had been withdrawn by their parents and two of the staff had resigned at the time of the first Order in Council. Molly, though naturally worried, could not blame them. The rest had simply not come back for the autumn term, except for Jane and Barbara and the eighteen girls who were still with them, and with the witch-hunt in full swing, Molly was surprised that any had returned at all. Then, with the earthquake, she had found herself responsible for them all. No word had come from any of the parents or from Jane's brother in Hudder
sfield or from Barbara's fiance
in London. They must all be presumed dead till proved otherwise. Meanwhile they themselves were alive, thanks to a good stock of vinegar for pickling, and Molly's prompt reaction to the Prime Minister's broadcast.

The period of the Madness had been a nightmare. They had no defence but a twenty-year-old revolver that had belonged to Molly's soldier father and exactly six rounds of equally ancient ammunition. Molly had managed to stockpile some food but it had had to be rationed to near-starvation level because they had no idea how long the siege would last. For siege it was. Woodbury Croft was in isolated Midland country but they saw roving madmen almost every day. Molly had had no choice - with eighteen girls aged eleven to seventeen on her hands - but to barricade the school's main building and stay inside it. On three occasions, when all seemed quiet, she had made a quick sortie with two of the senior girls (she picked the best sprinters) to gather what they could carry from the vegetable garden, Molly armed with the revolver and the girls with axes. The third time, they had been taken by surprise by a barefooted madman who had rushed at them out of a shrubbery. The bigger of the two girls had tried to hold him at bay with her axe and then Molly had shot him, astonished that the gun worked.

They had not visited the vegetable garden again until the Government radio confirmed that the Madness was over.

Since then, they had seen no one but two nomad families who had passed by with little to add to what they had guessed already - that there were no neighbours in evidence for several kilometres. Woodbury Croft was on its own.

Molly, her two assistants, and one or two of the older girls had started planning. The vegetable garden was fortunately large, for home-grown vegetables had been part of the school's policy and it could be extended. They had some seeds and looted more from the shop in the tiny abandoned village four kilometres away. (Why it had been abandoned remained a mystery; there were only four corpses - all obviously madmen - and all of the few vehicles which they were used to seeing there were gone.) They had rounded up three cows, two calves, and a bull, and about a dozen hens with a cockerel. Until their own vegetable area's extension began to produce, there was plenty to see them through the winter in the deserted fields and gardens.

Molly had begun to feel more confident; the girls (with the one or two inevitable exceptions) had rallied remarkably well; the work was getting done, and they were even managing to put in a few hours a week of classroom education, for Molly was determined that as far as possible the school should continue to be a school. Farther ahead she could not see.

She hoped they would not remain in all-female isolation for too long; it was not healthy or natural for growing girls, and Molly herself, though unmarried, frankly liked male company. She particularly missed Jock Innes, her own High Priest, and his brother Alec, who had visited the school without fail for all the festivals, and oftener if they could, to hold Circles for the staff witches and for those of the girls whose parents wished it. ('Like a convent's confessor,' he used to joke.) Perhaps Jock and Alec were dead too, now. One night, in a crisis of loneliness, Molly had sat quietly in her bedroom and opened up her astral awareness, trying to pick them up. She had been so swamped by the horror that pervaded the astral plane, at the height of the Madness, that she had withdrawn from it at once, gasping and weeping, and had not tried again.

Doreen and Kathy worked their way along the line of onions, Kathy doing most of the talking as usual. Th
ey did not look like sisters; Do
reen, almost seventeen, abundant red hair caught in a waist-length ponytail, already full-breasted and wide-hipped, of whom everyone had always said 'she's the quiet one'; Kathy, just fifteen, with her short black mop and boyish figure, who was never still and never silent. Yet they had always been close and although each was in her own way essentially feminine, they seemed aware of a creative polarity of difference which they enjoyed as a man and woman might. They were the only children of witch parents who would have been reluctant to send them to boarding school, if their father's job as a foreign correspondent for
The Times
had not kept him (and their mother, once the girls were old enough) constantly on the move.
Their mother had always arranged
to be at home for the school holidays, or to take them with her, if it could be managed, to where their father was. A very gifted witch herself, she had spent much of their time together training the girls in the Craft, and they had taken to it like ducks to water, working very well as a partnership because of that very polarity of difference. It was just as well that they were close, now, because they knew it was almost certain they were orphans.

'I hope we'll be growing some
spring
onions, too,' Kathy was chattering. 'These big fat ones are nice, specially for cooking, I like 'em with mashed spuds, but fried is best -only fat's hard to come by now, isn't it? But spring onions, come salad time, salad's so
boring
if it's just lettuce and things...'