Omega (26 page)

'I don't mind being thought bourgeois,' Greg conceded, 'as long as I get a solid working-class breakfast.'

'Who
are
you kidding?' Eileen asked. 'My father was a railway porter, so I reckon that makes me working-class. And
my
breakfast's a cup of coffee and a biscuit.'

'It wasn't this morning.'

'That was a special occasion.'

'Couple of months of this sort of life,' Dan said, 'and we'll
all
be wanting a real breakfast.'

With mock solemnity he put it to the vote, and Angie's suggested nomenclature was duly adopted. Moira found herself strangely pleased by the apparently trivial exchange, if only because everybody had so easily entered into the fun of it; the ability to share such nonsense cemented the tribe. . . . Come on now, she told herself, don't get so analytical! But the feeling remained.

The time came to put D
iana to bed, in her little inner
'room' of the tent. She put up a show of reluctance but in fact could hardly keep her eyes open, and Dan, who had a way with bedtime stories, managed to settle her down and she was fast asleep with the story half told. Dan and Moira rejoined the others round the fire; a contented silence had fallen on them all and a bright first-quarter moon was transforming mountain, forest and meadow.

After a while, Rosemary said quietly: 'What a night for a Circle.'

'We're not all witches, now,' Moira said. 'We'll have to hold our Circles when we're not putting Angie and Eileen out.'

'You do your own thing as and when you want to, my dears,' Angie told them. 'You want to dance round the fire, or something, you do it. I
’
ll go and baby-mind Diana -and Eileen can read a book or knit a sock or whatever.'

They protested politely but Angie firmly withdrew, taking Eileen with her. Eileen disappeared into the caravan and Angie settled down in a camp-chair by Moira and Dan's tent where she could hear if Diana woke. Ginger Lad (who had spent the day exploring and approving the camp site) climbed into her lap and purred.

She watched, with half-sleepy interest, while the two young couples and the old woman set up their Circle with the fire as its centre, some fifty paces from where she sat. Tightly packed as their vehicles had been, they obviously regarded their ritual equipment as essential baggage, for Dan fetched a hamper from the car and took from it various objects including a cloth which he used to transform the hamper into an altar, placing it to the north, which lay towards the tents and the forest of spruce. They stood three candle-lanterns around the Circle at the east, south, and west points and three more on the altar with other things which Angie could not distinguish at that distance, except for a chalice and an incense-burner and a couple of bowls. A light sword flashed firelight as Moira laid it at the foot of the altar. When everything was ready, the four younger ones took off all their clothes. Angie wondered if old Sally would too, and was amused to hear snatches of an exchange between her and Moira in which Sally wanted to strip - which, Angie inferred, she always did indoors -but Moira forbade it. Sally .appeared to grumble, briefly, but remained clothed. Youngster or not, Moira's authority as High Priestess was obviously accepted.

Moira picked up the sword and began to walk clockwise round the Circle.

'O thou Circle; be thou a meeting-place of love and joy and truth, a shield against all wickedness and evil.. ..'

Moira's voice came clearly to her in the still air but after a while Angie stopped listening to the words themselves, finding herself caught up in the magical atmosphere of the scene and the dignified intimacy of the ritual. It was almost as though the mountains and the forest had moved imperceptibly inwards, watching and uniting with the focal fire and the young and old bodies that moved around it. The coven had linked hands now - not in a full ring, because the five of them could not quite reach each other round the fire, but in a circling chain with Moira at its head, chanting in quiet chorus:

'Eko, Eko, Azarak,

Eko, Eko, Zamilak,

Eko, Eko, Cermirmos,

Eko, Eko, Aradia...'

Then Angie saw two things, simultaneously; Eileen walking naked from the carava
n towards the Circle, and Peter
O'Malley watching, motionless, from the edge of the forest. Moira saw Eileen coming and smiled, breaking away from the circling group to pick up the sword and sweep it anticlockwise over a part of the perimeter as though opening an invisible door. Eileen ran through it, Moira closed the 'door' with a clockwise sweep, and Eileen was circling with the rest.

Angie looked across at Peter, wondering what he would do.

'By all the power of land and sea,

By all the might of moon and sun . . .'

Unhurriedly, Peter took off his clothes and laid them by the forest edge. Then he, too, walked across to the Circle like a young bearded Pan, and waited outside it. Moira was still smiling, and picked up her sword again to admit him as she had Eileen.

Seven of them were enough to encircle the fire and the ring closed.

Angie was spellbound; the circling bodies, moon- and fire-lit, seemed like nature-spirits, as much creatures of earth, air, fire and water as the wild landscape within which they moved. She wondered how long it would be before she, too, was irresistibly drawn in. The thought scared her a little and she drew back from it, but the magic still held her. The chanting became wordless, one with the distant rushing of the waterfall, the crackling of the fire and the secretive forest-sounds.

It was almost a shock when Moira spoke, her words unmistakably human again. She had halted before the altar with her arms raised, a tall fire-bronzed nymph about to call on the powers that created her, while the others ranged themselves behind her, suddenly still after their ring-dance.

Moira's voice was not loud but it seemed to flow through Angie and past her into the depths and heights of the forest and into nameless regions beyond.

'O Great Mother, thou who are called in this land Cerridwen of the rich earth and Arianrhod of the infinite sky, hear us I Let us be at peace in this place,
at one with
thy creatures and at one with thy mysteries. Nourish us at thy cauldron of abundance and immortality,
O
Cerridwen; teach us thy heavenly wisdom, O Arianrhod of the Silver Wheel. We invoke thee to aid us and we invoke thy consort, the Horned God of the Forest, to protect us and strengthen us; for we are all your creatures, we of the Craft and our friends also; and into your hands, our Mother and our Father, we place ourselves. Hear us, and grant that
we may hear you. So mote it be!
'

'So mote it be!'

Wide-eyed, Angie saw, but could not believe, that the High Priestess and her followers stood within a sphere of pale, shimmering violet that domed above them and completed itself (she knew but could not see) in the dark rock beneath them. And from forest and mountain came a deep sigh of acceptance, a wind that was not a wind, limitless yet living; it embraced the sphere and all within it, sweeping over Angie too, leaving her breathless and blind. She lost herself in that living wind for a time that had no measure.

Then, slowly, the moonlit landscape took on form around-her once more. How long she had been entranced she could not tell, but Moira and the others stood around her now, clothed and smiling and human.

Moira asked without anxiety: 'Are you all right, Angle?'

'Yes
...
yes, I'm all right. What did you
do
then?'

‘I
didn't do it. It's there all the time. We just spoke to it - or to Her and Him, rather.'

Angie had no words.

Peter stood on the edge of the group and said: 'Thank you, all of you. I'll be off home now. Good night.'

They chorused 'Good night, Peter,' and he waved and left.

‘I
think it's time for bed,' Moira said.

12

As August moved towards September, the little group settled in and established a routine. In one sense they were in a difficult position; if what they all spoke of as 'the breakdown' (without being sure quite what it meant, but sharing the premonition) had already happened, they would have done many things such as starting to cultivate the meadow, even cutting timber to build winter shelters; but until then, they had at least to appear to be camping holiday-makers. Peter's permission would suffice if one of his Forestry Commission superiors came their way but if they had obviously made any move towards permanent settlement, they would land Peter himself in trouble for having allowed it.

They could, however, stockpile supplies, and Peter, now thoroughly in their confidence, helped in two ways. He showed them a logging road which bypassed New Dyfnant, so that they could come and go without drawing attention to their continuing presence; it was a good five kilometres longer but worth it. And he showed them a cave in the spruce forest, a few minutes from the camp but invisible to anyone who did not know the plantation intimately
, where
stores could be hidden. It was too irregularly shaped to be considered as living quarters, but for dry storage it was ideal, and from every shopping sortie they brought back more things to put in it: gas cylinders, potatoes by the sack, polythene sheeting, extra bedding, clothing, canned food, petrol whenever they could buy jerrycans, though these were becoming very scarce. . . . They had second thoughts about storing petrol in the cave and began burying the jerrycans instead.

Money, strangely enough in the circumstances, was no problem yet; they had hundreds of pounds with them in actual cash and Dan, Moira, and Greg had banker's cards, though they were reluctant to use them locally in case they were on any official 'wanted' list and their bank accounts were being watched for clues to their whereabouts - unlikely as yet but not impossible. But there was no point in hoarding money which might suddenly become worthless so they pooled it, and trusted whoever went on shopping sorties to spend it wisely. Buying gas cylinders without handing in empties, for example, was a highly expensive way of stockpiling gas, but they agreed it was worth doing. Greg, nosing round a dealer's yard in Welshpool, came home proudly with a second-hand rotovator and an even more second-hand chain-saw, which he had picked up very cheaply and was confident he could put in working order; these would be worth their weight in gold to get a permanent settlement started and gave an additional incentive to stockpiling petrol - so they took to emptying the jerrycans into more easily obtainable polythene containers, technically illegal for petrol storage but quite usable if sealed and buried with suitable care and well dispersed. He also bought a drum of twin-core flex and a lot of twelve-volt bulbs, an almost-new car alternator and various bits of junk out of which he planned, when the time came, to build a waterfall-driven battery-charger so that the camp could have wired lighting.

Eileen's needs, as camp medical officer, received particular attention; she drew up lists of stores and of reference books, which they bought for her as quickly as they could.

The shopping sorties were made daily, on a careful plan. Several towns within an hour's journey were visited, but never twice running, and as far as possible by different people. The one thing they did not want was for their faces to become familiar anywhere locally. They all agreed that Angie and Eileen who had both deserted security-classified jobs were better kept entirely out of sight (in addition to which, Eileen the nurse was too precious to risk) so they stayed in camp. So did Sally (though protesting) because of her age, and Diana because she did not understand enough to guard her tongue in front of strangers. This -apart from Peter, who helped a lot during his own shopping trips - reduced the shoppers to Dan and Moira, Greg and Rosemary. There was no real need for them to go in couples, but they did because they were determined to sink or swim together. If they ran into trouble, they preferred to do it as a pair, rather than face the unbearable possibility of one of them failing to return and the other being left both ignorant of his or her fate and helpless to do anything about it. In Dan and Moira's case, this meant a further distress - the possibility of not returning to Diana; but at least Di had grown up with Greg and Rosemary all her life and if anything happened to her parents they would treat her as their own and Di's own distress would be softened. All the same, Greg and Rosemary insisted on taking the bigger share of the trips and confining Dan and Moira' to what Greg called 'the town-frequency requirement'.

Their insistence, voiced round the camp fire one evening while they were discussing the next day's work, brought into the open for the first time the question of leadership -and surprisingly, it was Eileen who put it into words. Dan was sticking out for an equal sharing of the shopping sorties when Eileen entered the argument.

'I think Greg's right,' she said, 'for another reason, too. An army doesn't put its generals at risk, if it's got any sense.'