Omega (36 page)

He straightened up to speak to her but the expression on her face silenced him. After a second or two she turned and ran and he could hear her retching and sobbing as her footsteps died away.

Distressed, he waited for a chance to speak to her alone that evening by the camp-fire. She gave him a nervous half-smile, quickly extinguished, as though she wanted to make amends but he knew the barrier was there.

'It has to be done, you know,' he said, 'and there's no one but me to do it. Those foxes could be killers - and the poor bloody squirrels
...'

‘I
know.'

'Keep away from that clearing, eh? I won't burn 'em anywhere else.'

'It's not just that. I can hear every shot you fire. Oh, Peter
...'

He laid a hand on her arm but she jerked it away. 'You see?' she went on 'I can't bear . . . Please, Peter - I
know
it's me and it's stupid and wrong and unfair to you - but I can't
help
it! Killing makes me physically sick. I
try,
but

She broke off and for a long time they both stared into the fire without speaking. He was still trying to find what he could possibly say when the others joined them, and the moment was gone.

That was the evening when the forest camp 'changed gear'. The phrase was Dan's and he introduced it in the usual camp-fire discussion of the next day's work.

'It's all very well sitting here and fixing duty shifts for washing-up and what have you,' he said, 'but I think it's time we changed gear. Time we started thinking about the future.'

'Haven't we?' Angie asked. 'I'd say we'd been pretty far-sighted, the way we've been laying in stores and thinking out wh
at'll
come in useful and so on.'

'Yes, Angie - but those days are over. We can't go on shopping sorties any more; if there is any trade, it'll be by barter and that won't be till things have settled down. We don't even know
how
they'll settle down. Let's fa
ce it, we don't know how many pe
ople'll be left alive. We don't know how widespread the Dust was or how many were caught by it or what'll happen to them.
Can
they survive, Eileen?'

'I don't see how,' Eileen answered. 'They can't look after themselves, they'll be fighting and killing each other, and the rest'll be killing
them.
Like they did in the village.' She said it in an expressionless, brittle voice.

'They had no choice, love. They were already attacking the kids.'

'One
was.'

'I know how you feel but it's done - and what's going to happen in places where they aren't just three or four but hundreds - the ma
jority, perhaps? The sane ones'll
have to kill or be killed - the mad ones
’
ll give 'em no option.' He could feel Eileen withdrawing into her shell, so he slid away from the subject. 'Anyway, let's just say we don't know what the size of the population will be, what with the earthquake itself, the Dust and the tidal waves. The Government broadcasts tell us damn all - discounting the hourly repeats, they add up to a couple of hundred words a day. They're obviously battening down the hatches and letting us stew in our own juice till the worst is over. Then I suppose they'll come out and take charge.'

'If they sti
ll really exist,' Greg said. 'All
right, they've still got a transmitter - though they've scrapped TV and that's a pointer in itself
...'

'No, it isn't. There aren't enough battery sets to make it worth while with power gone. And
they
run off car batteries which most people can't recharge. But radios will go on for a long time yet. So Beehive sticks to radio.'

'AH right, granted that. My point is that the earthquakes might have virtually wiped the Beehives out as an effective force. These broadcasts may just be a bluff.'

'We don't
know,'
Moira said, 'and we shan't, unless and until they do come out - so there's not much point in discussing it, is there?'

Greg grinned, unabashed. 'Okay, okay. What
were
you on about, Dan?'

'Just this,' Dan said. 'Before the quake we were camping here, hoping that with Peter's help the Forestry Commission wouldn't notice us. But now, no Forestry Commission. We
live
here and bloody lucky we are with it. And the winter's coming. I think it's time we started cutting down trees to build cabins and ploughing the meadow for autumn vegetable-sowing, getting Greg's alternator rigged at the waterfall for charging batteries and so on. In other words, start turning this into a
permanent
camp.'

Once stated, it was obvious, and nobody disagreed. They all fell to discussing priorities and the only surprise came when Rosemary said, 'As it's going to be our home, it ought to have a name', and Father Byrne (who spoke little but helpfully) suggested: 'How about Camp Cerridwen?'

They all looked at him in astonishment.

'Father!' Moira said, laughing. 'You're very tolerant of our pagan ways even though you thoroughly disapprove of them. But I never thought you'd suggest we call our camp after a pagan goddess.'

The old priest looked apologetic. 'It must be the Celt in me but I have a great affection for the old legends. I don't base my theology on them, that's all. . . . But here we are in the Welsh mountains, making our home in a hidden valley that's like a fertile cauldron. The Cauldron of Cerridwen. So why not Camp Cerridwen?'

T think it's a marv
ellous name,' Moira said. ‘I
propose we vote on it.'

'Point of information,' Angie asked. 'Who
was
Cerridwen?'

'A Welsh Mother-Goddess, who had a cauldron representing several ideas - abundance, inspiration, rebirth
...'
'Enough said. I'll vote for that.' So did everybody; and Camp Cerridwen it was.

They worked hard, isolated from the outer world from which no news came. The few refugees who straggled into New Dyfnant came from no further afield than the devastated Vyrnwy valley and knew nothing outside their personal stories - except for terrible rumours of the Madness in Llanfyllin a dozen kilometres away and Welshpool , twice as far, which were always second- or third-hand and might or might not be wildly exaggerated.

The hourly BBC official broadcasts, cryptic and repetitious, told them little except by inference. The only specific information they gave and that only in the first Week or so, came in tidal wave warnings; particular areas were warned of imminent disaster. Angie, the camp's best geographer, noted the warnings and checked them on the map. The danger-line had been lowered to the fifty-metre contour, she noticed - presumably on more exact data - but the overall picture was still calamitous. No coastal area escaped but it was obvious that funnels like the Scottish firths and the Severn and Thames estuaries, urban plains like Lancashire and Cheshire and low-lying marine counties in
East Anglia must be suffering terribly from the mountains of sea that surged round the British Isles. With that coming on top of the earthquake and the Dust, it was not possible to begin to imagine what the death-toll might be. Angie did not communicate the scant news she had to the others except when they asked - and they rarely did. None of them was callous but the disaster was almost too vast for compassion to be meaningful. They were alive, and safer than most, so all they could do was work to stay that way until the outer world thrust itself upon them.

Their first decision was that, barring extreme emergencies, the motor vehicles were not to be used. Every litre of petrol would be saved for the chain-saw and the rotovator which were now in action round the clock. Dan and Peter went down to the village to see what could be done about bartering for a horse and cart. The result was almost embarrassing. They returned with one sturdy draught horse, two saddle horses (with saddles and bridles), and a farm cart with a plough and a harrow in it; and any suggestion of payment was brushed aside.

'Look now, man,' Dai Forest Inn told Dan when he tried to argue. 'We
are
alive and sane in New Dyfnant, if sane we ever were, that is, thanks to you people up there. Only one man gone mad through the Dust, of our own people, and his own fault, wasn't it? And but for you, it might have been the whole bloody lot of us. Witches you may be but that's between you and God and your own business. But you looked after us and what's a horse or two compared with that?'

'All the same
...'

'All the same nothing, Dan bach. Their owners died in th
e earthquake,
so they're communal property, like, see? And who better to look after them than our friends in the forest? Come now, and have a whisky while I've still got a bottle or two left.'

Another strange gift was wished on them by official decision of New Dyfnant council: two ruined farmhouses on the edge of the forest, from which only they had the right to salvage usable items and materials, the original owners also having died in the earthquake. The villagers were warned off and meticulously observed the ban. Camp Cerridwen appreciated this privilege greatly, because there were many things there, from doors and window-frames to a kitchen stove which would burn logs, all invaluable for the cabins they were building - not to mention hen-houses, garden tools and so on.

One of the farms had nearly half a hectare of vegetable garden, and that too was allocated to the camp. Most of it was potatoes, now ready for lifting, but there were also brussels sprouts and cabbage, carrots, and a few rows of beans. Everybody was delighted, especially old Sally, who had been appointed storekeeper and rationing-calculator.

The cabin-building went ahead surprisingly fast, considering that none of them were experts. All they had was Peter's knowledge of timber, Greg's flair as a handyman and two photographs of Finnish log cabins in a travel book of Angie's. At least there was suitable timber a few metres away. Greg and Dan felled it, helped increasingly by Peter as the afflicted foxes and squirrels became fewer through his culling and through natural deaths. Angie, who was remarkably strong, gave a hand with the trimming in spite of their protests, and the draught horse was used to drag the timber to the site. They also had regular volunteer help from a muscular but inarticulate village lad who fancied Eileen but was getting nowhere with her. He accepted his failure philosophically and went on helping.

There were technical problems to be solved, mostly by trial and error - such as the shallowness of the topsoil over the rock plateau (how deep should holes be pickaxed for the uprights?) and the choice of suitable material for packing the crevices between the trunks (would mud bound with straw stand up to the weather?) - but they got round these one by one, and their first cabin took shape. It was to be a central, communal, living-and-eating room with a stove, in which the tent-dwellers could also sleep as a temporary measure if the cold weather came before sleeping-cabins were ready; the caravan-dwellers would be all right, though attention was paid to lagging and screening Angle's caravan and Peter's trailer for greater warmth.

With so much building to be done, there seemed little hope of tilling much of the six-hectare meadow yet. So they selected the easiest stretch - about a hectare of clean grass with no more than a dozen small bushes to be dug out - and began to rotovate it., But here Eileen's mute admirer took over and harnessed the draught horse to the plough they had been given. He was a very bad ploughman and the result was not pretty but the soil
was
turned and deeper than the rotovator could reach. Learning from him, after a few hours Dan found he could do almost as well as far as straightness of furrow went, though the horse paid little attention to his commands and the whole process was very time-consuming.

'It'll look better when we've harrowed it,' Greg said hopefully.

Moira, Rosemary and Eileen felt a little guilty and frustrated about the building and ploughing, because being young and healthy they wanted to help more but simply had not the muscles for this stage of the work. Even Dan and Greg, town-bred as they were, were exhausted at the end of each day.

The camp-fire was very welcome in the evenings, for the first chill of autumn was in the air. They dug a second hear
th farther away, for use on the
odd evening when the wind (which mostly was funnelled either up or down the valley) blew at all strongly towards the trees. It was round this more exposed fire that Geraint Lloyd found them huddled one evening when he rode up to visit them on his bicycle, as he did fairly regularly to give them what news he had been able to pick up on his ham radio and to bring up batteries for recharging. Greg had jury-rigged a water-wheel to drive his alternator, pending a more durable structure and was only too glad to help Geraint keep his radio going. (Geraint, as ingenious as Greg in his own way, had converted an old baby-carriage into a trailer for his bicycle to carry the batteries.)