Omega (14 page)

'All
right, Devil's Advocate, I'll tell you. Another earthquake, maybe a much worse one.
Real
panic and an anti-witch explosion. We're being set up for it, whether deliberately or not. And it wouldn't be just books they'd be burning. They'd be burning
us.'

Diana stirred in her sleep, murmuring, and Rosemary said, 'Careful, Greg. Small ears.'

They were silent again, but all the faces turned towards Moira, sitting cross-legged with her back to the altar. She drew herself up instinctively, knowing that it was always like this while they were in the Circle. Dan and Greg would state the facts as they saw them, checked and balanced by contributions from Rosemary and Sally, and when they were ready, they would lay the problem at her feet. Not as Moira Mackenzie, wife and friend, alone; but as High Priestess, into whom, with the 'drawing down of the Moon' early in the ritual, the Goddess had been invoked, as channel, as oracle, as pythoness.

'Greg is right,' she said.

Dan asked immediately: 'What had you in mind, Greg?'

We're lucky,' Greg said, 'we've both got garages. We can keep the cars loaded up without attracting attention. Your station wagon's ideal, but our Beetle's too small. There's a Bedford van in the workshop the owner wants to flog -
I
can trade the Beetle in for that. It's in good nick, I overhauled it myself. We're OK for camping equipment -Sally could have the blow-up igloo tent and the rest of us the big frame jobs. Use the van as kitchen...'

'Rosemary and I will stock up rations,' Sally interrupted. 'Moira can see to Di's needs, medical stuff, and so on. You boys can see to tools, gas cylinders, weapons and that.'

How calm she is, Moira thought.

'Did you say weapons?' Rosemary asked, a little shakily.

'Don't be daft, girl. Of course I said weapons.'

'But
..
.'

'Leave that to us,'
Dan said. 'Think of rabbits and
pheasants if it makes you easi
er...Should we pack a sew
ing machine?'

'Mine's the lightest,' Moira said.

'OK then. Now, about currency..."

The practical debate became almost eager, and Moira (High Priestess or not) was suddenly overtaken by a moment of terror. She managed to conceal it, because she recognized it for what it was: the acknowledgement, at last, of the spectre they had all been suppressing. They
had
all been telling themselves that the earth tremors were a freak phenomenon, that the witch-hunt was a passing madness; they had paid lip-service to the sense of growing crisis but they had not really let themselves believe it. Even she, with the clear warnings which her Tarot readings had unlocked from the storehouse of her intuition, had been running away from their implications. Now the barriers were down. It had only taken Greg's proposal, and her own
ex cathedra
endorsement of it, for pretence to evaporate.... They could be on the brink of disaster. Homes, friendships, the protection of law, the certainty of recognizable tomorrows, could all be snatched from them. They must be ready. The truth had been faced; now, in an avalanche of acceptance, they could talk of cars, tents, sewing machines - and weapons.

Moira's moment of terror ebbed. She was aware of the altar at her back, and of her own function; she straightened her spine proudly, throwing her hair backwards, hollowing her stomach, jutting her breasts, grasping her spread knees firmly in each hand.

Dan caught her eye and sent her a private smile. He always knew.

Some news of anti-witch violence did get into the media but they suspected that more was going on than was being reported. A neighbouring coven in Woking had a window broken and two parked cars burned during a Circle, and a friend of Greg's who was a High Priest in Liverpool wrote that his teenage daughter had been waylaid in a back street by an unknown but obviously purposeful gang who shaved her head and painted 'WITCH' on her scalp with gentian violet. Neither of these incidents made even the local press - probably, Dan suggested, because they might create sympathy for the victims. Reporting seemed selective and mostly confined to clashes where the witches had fought back, so that doubt could be cast on who had provoked whom.

Some liberal opinion did make itself heard, condemning the violence, but even this current of feeling could, it seemed, be exploited. It so happened that a parliamentary by-election was to be held on 20 July in the constituency which included Bell Beacon and an Independent candidate, Quentin White, who had been standing on a rather vague combination of local issues, came out with a new demand - that public pagan festivals be made illegal, in the interests of civic order. White had been expected, indeed, had himself expected, to lose his deposit, but local revulsion at the Bell Beacon shambles was given a new outlet by his switched campaign, and his meetings, which had drawn handfuls, were now attracting hundreds. The constituency bordered on Staines, and Moira's group watched the campaign apprehensively.

'He can't get in, though, sur
ely,' Dan said. 'This ban-the-Fe
stivals thing of his - it's too bloody woolly. He doesn't say
how
it could be made law. Probably unconstitutional, in any case.'

'Come off it, Dan,' Greg protested. 'Voters aren't legalistic, they go for causes. And there's no such thing as the British Constitution. If an Act of Parliament says Tuesday is Wednesday, that's the law. The Constitution's only all the laws in force as of now, added together. And a State of Emergency could suspend even that.'

‘Y
ou're over-simplifying...'

'Sure I am and so's Quentin White. So will the voters, come polling day. I don't like it, mate.'

None of them liked it, and they liked it even less as the days went by. Parliament, the Prime Minister announced, was being recalled from its summer recess to debate an Emergency Powers Bill. This, he explained, would be merely a contingency measure to enable the Cabinet to act without delay in the event of any further natural disaster. Once passed, it would be held in reserve, only to be put into force by Order in Council, 'if and when a national emergency should make it necessary'. With his gift f
or making circumlocution sound e
arthily forthright, the Prime Minister managed to convey the simultaneous impression that earth tremors could strike again at any moment and that there was nothing at all to worry about.

On the face of it, they all agreed, there was nothing about ^ the Emergency Powers Bill to which any reasonable person could object. It was the Government's clear duty to be fully prepared to deal with the effects of any future earth tremors, and with the localized wreckage of the Midsummer tremors still to be seen, no one could pretend that the danger did not exist. But they could not help noticing that the Prime Minister had avoided too precise a definition of 'national emergency'. Once the Bill became an Act, it could be an all-purpose weapon.

None the less, the Bill was necessary and everybody knew it, so it had the nation's support. It did, however, create a climate favourable to firm government, and even in many minds (whether consciously or not) to the authorities' cutting red tape, taking short cuts and not being too squeamish about traditional liberties. So the effect on the by-election was marked; after the Prime Minister's statement, Quentin White had to begin hiring larger halls for his campaign meetings and the funds seemed to be forthcoming.

It was at this strategic moment that Ben Stoddart stepped in. Two days after the statement, Stoddart publicly threw the whole weight of his Anti-Pagan Crusade behind White's candidature. Two days after that, he appeared with White on the same platform. The meeting was packed out and had nation-wide TV coverage. There was little trouble from hecklers, both because the rest of the audience was hostile to the few who raised their voices and because two coachloads of visibly tough young Crusader arrived at the hall an hour in advance 'to
give a hand with the stewarding’
.

Next morning the 'stewards' were still in the constituency and reported for duty to White's committee rooms. They were sent out canvassing and within days the nickname 'stormtroopers' was being bandied about - not always, as Dan sourly observed, with disapproval.

Only once did the unspoken threat of their presence manifest in actual violence. A fiery young man who was well known locally as an active witch heckled persistently at one of the open-air Crusader meetings and was set upon by the stewards. The hospital had to put five stitches in his left cheek and four dangerously high inside his right thigh. Ben Stoddart issued a public reprimand to the stewards for 'over-enthusiasm' - a reprimand so mild that it was virtually an endorsement. After that there was no more trouble from hecklers.

The by-election remained national news, a focus for the whole anti-witch controversy. One side-effect was to introduce controversy, for the first time, into the Emergency Powers debate in the Commons. A group of members who had already declared their support for White's campaign introduced an amendment which would empower the Government to ban public religious gatherings of a pagan nature. The amendment, legally imprecise, was patently unacceptable as it stood, and the Government was able to secure its withdrawal by pointing out that the Bill in any case would give them all the necessary powers to forbid gatherings of any category that seemed undesirable in the context of any given crisis; but the tone of the debate had already changed. A small minority of MPs of various parties now began to voice criticisms of the Bill, on the grounds that the powers it gave would be open to abuse. What had looked like a quick and easy passage suddenly became hotly argued. The Government were worried; they had no doubt of a majority, but the debate was prolonging itself and they had hoped to avoid the imposing of a guillotine which would be psychologically regrettable.

On 24 July, Quentin White was returned with a 1832 majority over his nearest opponent in a four-cornered fight. The Liberal candidate lost his deposit. While the other two had hedged, he had been the only one to condemn the witch-hunt unequivocally. An hour after the result was declared, all his front windows were smashed.

Felicity Holroyd was not a brave woman. Barely one metre fifty-five tall, and very thin, she had to rely on quick wits and a sense of humour to control her classes; even so she had to put up with a certain amount of what her more awe-inspiring colleagues would have called gross impertinence. Her small face with it unnaturally large eyes gave her an air of vulnerability which simply invited teasing. What saved her from complete indiscipline was her gift of communicating her passionate love of her subject - English literature - to the most unpromising children. It might take her five minutes to get a class settled and reasonably quiet; but once launched, she held them, till the bell surprised them and her. She had had a chance, a year or two back, of a post with a distinguished grammar school in the South, but to her friends' surprise she had preferred to stay with very run-of-the-mill Wolverhampton comprehensive where she had started teaching nine years earlier. 'Any fool can stuff Shakespeare into a bright kid's head,' she had explained. 'But get
these
semi-literate telly-addicts enjoying him and life's worth while.'

That she had a remarkable proportion of them enjoying him - and enjoying many others from Austen to Yeats -she knew from the gratifying exam results; but more personally, for her, from her daily hour at the desk of the school library. The library was in her charge, and no one knew better than she who borrowed what and what they said about it when they brought it back.

But this evening she sat at that desk in a white rage, glad for once that a fine hot evening had thinned out her customers. Her anger was as much against herself as against the headmaster. She remembered the interview that afternoon with shame. She had stammered a protest, it was true; and given a few minutes she might have pulled herself together and made that protest a reasoned one. But the headmaster's phone had rung even as he brushed the protest aside and she had been left standing there, not knowing what to do, while he became involved in what was obviously going to be a long conversation. After a while he had put his hand over the mouthpiece, given her a quick lofty smile, said, 'See to it, will you, Felicity?', and returned to his conversation without waiting for an answer or even looking for her reaction.

And she
(
oh, you bloody coward)
had stood for another second or two indecisively, before walking out and shutting the door behind her, the list in her hand. It lay on the desk before her now.
All works by T. C. Lethbridge, Gerald
Gardner, C. G. Leland, C. A. Burland, Doreen Valiente, Israel Regardie
...
‘
Miss?'

She forced her attention
to the boy standing waiting at
the desk; she had not even noticed him arrive. 'Sorry, Don, I was dreaming What is it?'

The lanky sixth-former put a book on the desk. 'I brought back
The Sea Priestess
- I didn't quite get all of it but it was terrific. Have we got the other one,
Moon Magic? . . .
Claire say it's not quite as good but I'd like to read it anyway.'