Omega (48 page)

When Tonia had gleaned all she could, she insisted on being shown his equipment and asking if he would teach her to operate it, so that between them they could increase its hours on the air. Once she had his promise, she plu
nged into her plan for a village
-and-camp newspaper.

'For God's sake,' he laughed when she paused to draw breath, 'not so fast! You'll choke yourself.'

She grinned back at him, engagingly. 'Never get in the way of a frustrated journalist who smells an outlet. You're apt to get run down.'

Liz Warner put her head round the door and asked: 'Could I have him back now, do you think? It's been
two
hours.'

Eileen stood in the cabin door, tasting the air of sunrise and finding it good. Nobody was yet up except for Greg on sentry patrol and very probably Peter out doing the round of his snares - but she turned aside from that thought; it was too lovely a morning to examine distress. She closed the cabin door behind her and walked.

There had been some reshuffling of sleeping arrangements now that three family cabins were ready. Old Sally had moved in with Angie to share her motor caravan, which by now was cosily lagged and just right for the two older women, who had become close friends. Eileen and two unmarried girl newcomers, now joined by Miriam, had been allocated one of th
e family cabins which had promptl
y been dubbed the Spinster Shack. Since the oldest of them was twenty-four, they had taken no more than pretended offence at the name.

Although it was late October - only a few days to go to Samhain - the weather, apart from a couple of damp and chilly weeks at the end of September and beginning of October, had been exceptionally kind with temperatures over
15
degrees
almost every day and mild nights. Dan, who had found a maximum-minimum thermometer in the greenhouse of one of the ruined houses in New Dyfnant which had been allocated to them for 'looting', and an old barometer in the kitchen (he wished it had been a barograph), kept daily records. He wondered out loud whether the world cataclysm had produced permanent climatic changes. Peter, for one, hoped not; he had no desire to see Wales or anywhere else for that matter lose its character, its evolved natural balance. Others, still only half-adjusted to rugged
pioneering, were not so sure. I
f Wales goes sub-tropical,' Sam Warner said, 'that'll suit me fine. Nature will find a new balance. When interfering man is as thin on the ground as he is now, ecology has a chance to be self-adjusting.' The discussion was academic in any case; it would be years before any permanent changes became discernible from chance fluctuations.

This morning Eileen cared nothing for long-range climatology. It was enough that today's sky was soft and clear, that only the gentlest of breezes made sea-sounds in the treetops, that the ground was dry under her rubber sneakers and that she felt no need for a jacket over her sweater and jeans.

She strolled over to Greg who had stopped to talk to the goats tethered among the tree-stumps where daily felling was pushing the edge of the forest back. The goats looked at them with their strange primordial eyes and went on munching. They laughed and left them, Eileen walking beside Greg as he continued his patrol towards the logging lane, round the bend of the tree-line.

'Still an hour to breakfast,' Eileen said. 'I think I'll climb up to the Giant's Bed.'

'Wish I could come with you. It'll be marvellous up there, on a morning like this.'

She waved to him from the edge of the plantation and started walking up one of the dark, straight, two-metre-wide paths that quartered the forest like a chessboard. It was more a tunnel than a path, for the tall conifers brushed each other's branches above her head. Every now and then she came to a little clearing, some of them dictated by outcrops of mountain rock. She was heading for the bigger outcrop, known locally as the Giant's Bed, half a kilometre above the camp and when she reached it, it was worth the climb. She picked her way through the brambles that guarded the foot of the grey bastion, scrambled among the bilberries and mosses that hugged its crevices and found herself at last on its table-top, jutting into the sky clear of the downhill trees. The whole of the camp's private valley spread below her and the ring of mountains faced and flanked her, under a vast kindly sky. She could see one or two of the camp roofs and the woodsmoke of the kitchen stove being lit for breakfast, through the ranks of Christmas-tree fingers that pointed up singly from each tree, seeming to admonish her:
Be still, watch, listen . . .

Eileen sat cross-legged on the rock, absorbing the morning's contentment, till she realized it must be time for breakfast.

She skipped happily through the brambles and down another tunnel leading more directly to the camp.

It was at the first intersection that she glimpsed, briefly, the strange man leading away the stolen goat. She jumped back quickly into cover, trying to collect her thoughts. The thief must have sneaked the goat away while Greg was at the other end of the camp and while the people who were up were still either in their cabins and caravans or busy in the kitchen. It was all too easy; the goats were a few metres from the forest edge but a good hundred and fifty metres from the buildings. A quick dash from cover, a knife through the rope
...

Which way was he heading? She had only seen him for a second and although she could find her way around, it was hard to build up a map of the forest paths in her mind. Anyhow, what could she do about him? He must be armed, at least with a knife. She would have to try to get another glimpse of him, fix his direction and then run for help. He could not move very fast pulling a goat, and even if they failed to catch him, they might frightened him into abandoning it.

She hurried through the trees in what seemed to her the most likely direction, doing her best to move quietly. Her guess had been all too accurate; she emerged into a clearing at the same moment as the thief - and in that moment they both saw Peter.

Eileen shouted a warning. Peter, sprawled on the ground loosening a rabbit's body from an awkwardly placed snare, jerked his head round, saw the stranger coming for him knife in hand and leaped to his feet. His twelve-bore was propped against a tree a few paces away. He lunged towards it but the man headed him off.

For a few seconds they faced each other, half-crouching, while Eileen held her breath. The man's eyes flicked to the shotgun and back again. He seemed to realize he could not reach it without risking the advantage of his knife, for Peter would be on him as he grabbed at it.

The goat, released and indi
fferent, moved away in search ,
of tastier grass.

Point forward, the man's knife-blade wove menacingly in the air - one quick feint, which Peter side-stepped -then a determined rush. Eileen screamed and Peter tried to side-step again, but his foot struck a root and he stumbled. The man leaped on him and the two of them were wrestling on the ground, Peter disadvantaged by his fall, the man's knife within a finger-length of his throat.

Eileen's paralysis broke, swept away by a berserker tide of love and fury. She leaped for the gun, cocked both hammers with hands that barely knew how, jammed the muzzle into the man's ribs and pulled both triggers.

The explosion seemed to stun her, physically and mentally. The recoil jerked the gun out of her inexperienced hands and it fell across the bleeding corpse as Peter pulled himself from underneath. He jumped to his feet, still panting from the struggle and put an arm round her shoulders as she stood staring wide-eyed at what she had done.

Gently he turned her and led her away from the body, sitting her down against a tree, facing where she could not see it.

'I killed him,' she said at last, in a voice of halting amazement.

'I know, love. And you saved my life.'

'I killed him. I took a gun and shot him to bits because I love you.
And I'd do it again.
Peter, what's happened? What
am
I?'

'You? You're the most wonderful woman in the world. The only woman I want, now or ever.'

She turned and looked into his eyes, still bewildered, as though she had not heard him. 'But don't you see? If anyone tried to hurt you, I'd do it again!
Me
!'

They went on looking at each other and gradually the bewilderment in her eyes faded away and she began to smile, a smile of love and longing. Quite how it all happened they could never remember afterwards, but all their clothes were away, and they were clasping and entwining and searching and discovering and adoring, naked and lovely to each other on the forest floor, a stone's throw from the forgotten dead enemy, and then, merged and triumphant, they were swept into that nodal point of joy where the meaning of the universe is clear and never quite forgotten.

She lay afterwards cradled in his arms, gazing up through the branches at the shifting glimpses of sky, still too transfigured to ask herself if she was cold.

'This is a new and diff
erent Earth,' she told him, won
deringly.

Peter shook his head, holding her close, caressing her. 'No, it's not. It's the sam
e Earth as ever. But we've been
blind to her and to ourselves for too long. Now she's bringing us back to our senses - the ones that are left.'

She mocked him tenderly: 'How like a man, to put it into words and draw a moral.'

'Sorry - did I sound pompous?'

'No, my love, my darling. Besides, you're right. But for me . . . We're alive and we're part of
Her.
That's enough.'

PART TWO

21

'Only four this week, is it?' Dr Owen said, leaning back in his chair and swinging his stethoscope. 'You are all too damn healthy up here and that's a fact. I don't know why I come.'

Eileen grinned at him. 'You know very well why you come. For a morning out from the village and a lunch of grilled trout.' She patted her five-month belly. 'And to see how Junior's doing. Anyone'd think you were its grandfather, you fuss so much.'-

'Junior is doing fine without any help from me. I will concede your point about the trout, though. . . . And to be honest, Eileen fach,' he continued more seriously, 'I worry about young Brian. A crying shame it is, a promising lad like that, only two years at Guy's and no way
of ending his training. I feel I
should be teaching him more.'

'Don't be silly, Doctor
. He's learning a hell of a lot
from you, working in the vil
lage with you two days a week,
borrowing all your books,
helping me in the clinic here -
and I'm teaching him all I c
an, too. He'll end up as real a
doctor as if he'd finished his time at Guy's '

They strolled out togeth
er into the May sunshine, still
discussing Brian Sennett, the medical student who had reached Camp Cerridwen with his sister Olive in January. His arrival had been very welcome to Eileen, who in spite of Dr Owen's weekly visit to the little clinic that had been built on the end of Peter and Eileen's cabin, and his availability in a crisis, had begun to feel a little worried about her responsibility as the rapidly growing camp's resident 'medical officer'. She had, after all, only qualified as a nurse herself a couple of years before the quake. Peter, too, had been relieved. They had only just become reasonably certain that Eileen was pregnant and he was more anxious than she was about her overworking, so even a partially trained colleague for her eased his mind a good deal.

Camp Cerridwen was barely recognizable after a winter of work which had only been halted by one week's snow and (according to the village experts) slightly less than average rain. The camp now numbered
173
people, about three-quarters of them witches or children of witches and although some cabins were still overcrowded, everybody slept indoors, either in a cabin or in a lagged caravan. Building was now in full swing and within a month or six weeks was expected to catch up at least with the existing population, to an acceptable standard. They had stuck to the original C-shaped plan, with the buildings spread in an
arc
along the edge of the forest and facing towards the centre of the little plateau whose heart was the camp-fire. Cabins had their own rock-built fireplaces but it had become a social habit to light the central fire each evening, small or large according to the weather, and to gather around it.

The forest had, in fact, already receded from behind the first
are
of buildings as felling progressed, and a second row was springing up behind the first on the cleared ground. The biggest building of all was no longer the Central

Cabin, which was now used for a variety of small-
group purposes such as practice
sessions of the Music Club (the village had donated a battered piano and various people owned instruments from guitars to violins, an accordion and a cornet), Geraint Lloyd's surprisingly well-attended Welsh classes and talks by experts (such as the camp's solitary professional farmer) on their specialities which had now become necessary knowledge for everyone. Considerably larger than this, and a building achievement of which they were rather proud, was the Mess Hall. Central catering still had to be the rule, for the most economical use of their slim food resources.