Omega

EPILOGUE

There had been many handfastings and several Christian weddings at Camp Cerridwen in the year and three-quarters of its existence; but the handfasting of Mary Andrews and Nigel Pickering was a very special one. For one thing, until a week before it, they had not seen each other for two years – nor, since the great earthquake, had either of them known if the other was alive or dead. Very soon after the catastrophic Grand Sabbat on Bell Beacon, at which Mary had been Sabbat Maiden and Nigel her Priest, Nigel had been called to Yorkshire by the death of his father and the need to take over the family's small printing business. He and Mary had corresponded almost daily, for although not lovers or even engaged, they had been a close working partnership in their coven and they had missed each other very much. But with Nigel tied down by work and Mary by an invalid mother, they had not been able to visit each other. Nigel had at last been able to arrange a weekend journey to see her, at -which (he had decided and she had sensed) he was going to propose to her.

The earthquake had struck a week too early.

Both had survived by the skin of their teeth. Mary and her mother had been adopted by a neighbouring family, after the earthquake had destroyed their house; but three days later the family had succumbed to the Madness and Mary had been lucky to get her mother away in a stolen car, her sick mother driving while Mary nursed a broken arm. They had found a doctor in a Berkshire village who had set the arm and had settled down with the village's tiny group of survivors, defending themselves in a barricaded farmhouse on meagre rations till the Madness was over. Mary's mother, whose illness required special food, had died in spite of all the doctor could do for her.

Nigel, his home town of Elland a burning shambles, had taken to the moors with his brother, and they too had teamed up with a small community struggling to keep alive on poor land.

Mary and Nigel had both tried, especially after the collapse of Operation Skylight had brought a strange peace to the country, to get news of each other, however forlorn the hope. But after a travelling group had told Mary that Elland had been wiped out and Dan (whose brother's marriage to the only unattached woman in the community had made him even more aware of his loneliness) had actually trekked to Cookham in search of her and had found no clue, in both of them hope had faded to a dream.

Nigel had not returned to his moorland group. Camp Cerridwen was known by repute to virtually every witch in the country within two or three months of Skylight – as Midsummer 2004 was now called by everybody, transferring the name of the failed Operation to the dawn of the peace which had followed it. So Nigel had decided to see Moira and Dan again, and had made his way to Dyfnant Forest at the end of August. He had been welcomed with delight and persuaded, without difficulty, to stay. Camp Cerridwen had unanimously decided to limit their population to a maximum of 200, to keep it agriculturally viable and to preserve its character. But immediately after Skylight, when dozens of civilianized Army radio operators became aware of Geraint and Tonia's ham network and had enthusiastically joined it, news of survivors in search of friends and relatives had become a major part of its traffic. So about thirty people, including one complete coven from Camp Cerridwen, had departed with everyone's blessing to reunite families believed dead or to pick up old threads believed broken. And that left room for desirable recruits like Nigel.

Nigel had settled in well, his printer's instincts drawing him to Geraint and Tonia. He and they dreamed of a printed newspaper but that was out of the question for the present. He had, however, scoured nearby ruined towns with a horse and cart and in Llanfyllin had unearthed treasure in the shape of a stencil duplicator and a good stock of paper, ink and stencils. Foraging parties, which were now a regular activity of most communities, had been briefed on what to look for and the stock had grown substantially. So with the Samhain 2005 issue as No 1, Camp Ccrridwen's news sheet had become a weekly 'newspaper'. They called it The Cauldron after the Welsh Goddess's legendary vessel, and in memory of a respected Wiccan newsletter of the 1970s and '80s. It circulated in the camp and New Dyfnant and travelled with the trading carts over an area of twenty or thirty kilometres around. Soon its example was being followed in other places, based on the radio network which was becoming a well-organized news agency with Camp Cerridwen as its acknowledged nerve-centre.

Radio reception had improved steadily and news from abroad was beginning to take on a coherent shape. The world picture ranged from outright military dictatorship in one or two countries (Belgium, for example) to a situation very like Britain's, where a complex pattern of spontaneous cooperation between varied kinds of community was evolving in the absence of any State coercive apparatus. France and Denmark were outstanding examples. In the Arab countries, bedouin habits had been naturally readopted and in Israel, her rapidly expanding industry almost completely destroyed by the earthquake, a renaissance of kibbutzim had been equally natural. In some countries, such as Holland, the struggle to control the environment demanded large-scale cooperation as rapidly as it could be forged; the Dutch already had a functioning democratic government, an empirical but energetic structure, organizing the repair of the dykes and the reclaiming of polders by methods they would have regarded as crude two years before but which were getting the job done. Though completely unaggressive, they were having a marked moral effect on their Belgian neighbours, who resented the military clique in power and were likely to sweep it away before long, with 'Benelux' as their slogan of revolt.

In the Soviet Union, as Dan remarked to Geraint when after several months the picture became reasonably clear, 'the Earth Mother seems to have intervened in person'. Moscow Beehive had been completely wiped out by the earthquake, and with typical Russian centralism it had housed virtually everyone who mattered. Regional hives had attempted some kind of a Skylight-type takeover but, shorn of its real leaders, the Apparat had had little impact. The conscript armies, unequal in any case to the vastness of the territory, had been dissolved by the urge to go home. Here, too, a useful pattern for survival existed: the collective farms. Heavily depopulated as they were, they formed natural rallying-points for disbanded soldiers and fugitive townsfolk, and many of them seemed to have revived admirably.

What was happening in China, it was still too early to say; news was too thin and at too many removes. But such hints as there were seemed to point to a development similar to Russia's.

In India, the Dust had taken a terrible toll; New Delhi had given a vinegar-mask warning in good time, but the organization of supplies had been difficult and millions had been affected. Of those who were left at the end of the Madness, hundreds of thousands had contracted plague as they looted the uninhabitable cities for food. The remnants of the once-vast population had reverted to their immemorial village life and after disaster probably unparalleled anywhere else in the world, were achieving some kind of stability. Strangely enough, radio news from India was fairly plentiful; skilled refugees from a vanished technological civilization seemed to have an urge to communicate and enough of them had found or improvised the means.

America, being a continent and not a country in the ordinary sense, reflected most of these patterns. Urban life had virtually ceased to exist; New York, Los Angeles and other great cities were unapproachable rubble-heaps. There had been a general tendency to revert to State identity and in one or two places – Vermont, Illinois, Idaho – embryo State organizations were already struggling into being. Elsewhere – Oklahoma, Maine, Montana – the pattern seemed to be purely tribal and family, paralleling the British. There were pockets of brigandism, particularly on the fringes of the agricultural areas, and other pockets of fervently religious cohesion; Mormon Utah had a positively Messianic sense of identity. In California, as might be expected, a confusing patchwork of differently motivated communities vied with each other for attention. The American Beehives, with local patriotism as a morale factor in mind, had been organized in general on a State-by-State basis (with much cross-posting of personnel to give units a local character -a political decision which had greatly annoyed the top brass). But this had largely backfired. For the ordinary GI, and for many of his officers, home was too close, and in the face of universal destruction, too tempting. In many States, after Skylight, the Army had dwindled to a hard core of ex-townsmen whose homes, and even the remnants of whose communities, had vanished – and they were surrounded by independently minded farming groups, many of them armed deserters from their own ranks. Some wise commanders, in these circumstances, had abandoned all ideas of control and tried instead to provide useful services and protection against bandits.

One factor, in Europe and America, interested Dan in particular; in how many places had the witchcraft movement and a psychic battle been significant? He was collecting a dossier on the subject, but he was only at the beginning of his research, for in many places witches were cautious about talking on the air about such things. But he had some evidence already; for example, he was pretty certain that in West Germany, northern Italy and the Basque areas of France and Spain the witches had been well organized and had played an effective part. Interesting, he told himself, that those were the places where the emerging pattern of life seemed closest to that of the British Isles, and where armies had most quickly melted into the working population.

The Cauldron carried at the bottom of its last page the imprint: 'Editor, Geraint Lloyd. News Editor, Tonia Lynd. Published by Nigel Pickering at Camp Cerridwen, Dyfnant Forest, Montgomeryshire, North Wales.'

Mary Andrews first saw a copy early in June, a gift from an intinerant barter-pedlar. She had read it all through, eagerly, for Moira, Dan, Rosemary, Greg and one or two other old friends were mentioned in the camp news. Then she came to the imprint.

Within twenty-four hours – as long as she needed to bargain for a bicycle and to say goodbye to her community – she was on her way to Camp Cerridwen. It took her three days, all of them tormented by doubt. Was he married or involved with someone? Had he changed? Had she herself, too much for him?

She need not have worried. She rode into the camp on the third evening, too impatient to seek out Moira and Dan and announce herself, but simply asking the first stranger she met where she could find Nigel Pickering. The stranger directed her to a cabin from which came the churning sound of a hand-operated duplicator.

He answered the door and stood for a second gazing at her incredulously. Then he flung his arms round her, almost knocking her over; and when they both got their breath back, his first words to her after two years were 'Will you marry me?'

'I am attending the – er – handfasting,' the Reverend Phillips explained, 'I will not say "under protest", because that would be unneighbourly; let us say "with a certain sense of impropriety". But I will not stay till the evening and be a party to their pagan festival.'

'Oh, come now, my friend,' Father Byrne smiled. ' "Be a party to"! – it sounds like being an accessory to a crime. I never actually attend their rituals, of course, but neither do I scurry away out of sight of them if they are held in the open air. And I often gladly accept an invitation to enter one of their Circles once the ritual is over and the sociable part begins… And where's the "impropriety" about a wedding?'

‘You call it a wedding?'

'Of course it's a wedding. Two rather likable young people are being joined together, as man and wife, in front of their community and by a procedure recognized by that community. That defines a wedding – all the more so in the absence of any civil machinery for the purpose. If they choose to call it a "handfasting", I find it a charming word. Etymologically, "wedding" means "a surety" – sounds like a mortgage, doesn't it? "Handfasting" is much prettier.'

'It is still a pagan ritual, father. And you and I, as ministers of God – how can we be involved?'

'We are involved by our love for the people concerned.' The old priest sighed. 'And increasingly – God forgive me if I err – I have come to regard "pagan" as a rather meaningless label, in the two years since these young Samaritans picked up a sick old priest by Lake Vyrnwy and brought him to this camp. The Good Samaritan was a heretic, too, remember – which was the point of our Lord's parable… If you did watch tonight's Midsummer Sabbat, you would see 150 witches, as naked as the day they were born…' He smiled at his friend's shudder and went on: 'Shame at nakedness was the first symptom of the Fall, was it not?… As naked as the day they were born, joyfully saluting their Maker and honouring the Earth which is the Maker's gift. It matters less than I used to think, that they visualize that Maker as a duality of God and Goddess. You and I visualize Him as a Trinity – and the vast majority of my coreligionists at least worship a Goddess in the shape of the Blessed Virgin, whatever we theologians may try to tell them about the distinction between latria and hyperdulia… Are any of us wholly wrong, John? Have any of us a monopoly of the Mystery?… Do not mistake me; I am a Catholic and I believe as you do that Christ is the way and the truth and the life. I believe that these good people and they are good, you know that as well as I do – are missing much by not following that way. But nor will anyone convince me, any longer, that their way leads in the opposite direction. Or that I should be too proud to learn something from them. Etymologically, again, "pagan" means "of the countryside" – and we are certainly that here, all of us. And when tonight, the thirteen covens gather in their little Circles within the Great Circle, I shall be outside that Circle, but in a sense not alien to it. When they dance around the fire in honour of the Earth and the God-given currents that flow in her, I shall be with them in spirit, and I believe – if I may put it this way – that God will be, too.'

The minister was silent for a while and then said: 'I will agree with you on one point, anyway. These are good people, however misguided their ways. And rightly or wrongly, I am happy to wish Divine blessing on the – er -handfasting.'

Tactfully, Father Byrne managed not to smile at the younger man. 'The Prince of Peace,' he said, 'moves in mysterious ways.'

The Circle of cut blossom on the grass contained the members of Nigel's coven, and Nigel and Mary themselves facing Moira and Dan, who had been invited to perform the handfasting. They were all robed, out of deference to the many village guests among the remainder of the community squatting on the ground outside the ring of flowers. There was little human sound apart from the crooning of Eileen and Peter's nine-month-old daughter Deirdre, who thought the flowers were very pretty and wanted to reach and eat them.

Moira asked: 'Who comes to be joined together in the presence of the Goddess? What is thy name, O Man?'

'My name is Nigel.'

Dan asked: 'Who comes to be joined together in the presence of the God? What is thy name, O Woman?' 'My name is Mary.'

'Mary and Nigel, we greet you with joy…: Unity is balance and balance is unity. Hear then and understand.' Moira picked up the wand from the altar and continued: 'The wand that I hold is the symbol of Air. Know and remember, that this is the element of Life, of intelligence, of the inspiration which moves us onwards. By this wand of Air, we bring to your handfasting the power of Mind.'

Dan said: 'The sword that I hold is the symbol of Fire. Know and remember that this is the element of Light, of energy, of the vigour which runs through our veins. By this sword of Fire, we bring to your handfasting the power of Will.'

Moira said: 'The chalice that I hold is the symbol of Water. Know and remember that this is the element of Love, of growth, of the fruitfulness of the Great Mother. By this chalice of Water, we bring to your handfasting the power of Desire.'

Dan said: 'The pentacle that I hold is the symbol of Earth. Know and remember that this is the element of Law, of endurance, of the understanding which cannot be shaken. By this pentacle of Earth, we bring to your handfasting the power of the Steadfast…'

'How long will you be away, do you think?' Rosemary asked. It was past three in the morning, with the sky already lightening for the dawn and the pale full moon sliding to bed beyond the western hills. But the embers of the big Sabbat fire were hot enough for the four of them still to be skyclad, lingering after almost everybody else had gone to bed.

'Not more than a couple of weeks,' Dan said. 'It'll take the helicopters about three days to get all the representatives to Windsor and three to get us all home again. A week in between for the discussions.'

'How long will the fuel stocks last, ferrying people back and forth to Parliament?' Greg wondered.

'That's one of the items for discussion – how to use the helicopters best in the public interest, for as long as the stocks do last. There'll be people there who know how much Beehive had stockpiled… Anyway, it's not a Parliament. It's a Constitutional Conference under the King's chairmanship, to arrange the rules for a Constituent Assembly, which'll decide the basis for a Parliament, which will then have to be elected. It's a long process and we've got to get it right.'

'The King's certainly thrown his hat in the ring,' Greg said, 'announcing that he'll offer his abdication to Parliament once it's elected.'

'Yes, but he did make it clear why – and he had to do it well in advance, to give people time to chew it over. It's so that we can start with a clean slate, politically – and that includes deciding whether we want a republic or a monarchy. My guess is that Parliament will hang on to the King as King – or even if they plump for a republic, they'll elect him President. He'd be the obvious choice.'

'I'm glad you and Moira have been called to the Conference,' Rosemary said, 'but I'm not sure I'd want either of you to be an MP. Camp Cerridwen needs you both. And I think Camp Cerridwen's important. Not just for the two hundred of us.'

Moira smiled. 'Anyway, that'll be out of the question for me for a few years – so I doubt if you could drag Dan away.'

'You're pregnant!' Rosemary cried.

Two months.'

Greg laughed delightedly and Rosemary said:' 'Well, that's marvellous. I'm about six weeks. We were going to ell you when we were absolutely sure – but I am, really.'

That ended the political discussion.

There were rather more people coming and going in the echoing corridors of Beehive these days, following the necessarily rough-and-ready decisions of the Constitutional inference.

The guardhouses at the entrances were manned, for private looting had to be replaced by public salvaging; but the guards had little to do but keep an eye open for brigand groups attempting an organized raid – for such groups still existed, though their number was rapidly diminishing.

Then there was the Mint. Few people, even in Beehive, had known of the heavily protected 'Fort Mini-Knox' under Finsbury Park, in which the nation's gold reserves and much silver had been stored. After the Conference, it had been officially breeched and coining machinery, salvaged from the ruined Royal Mint by Tower Bridge, moved in beside it, the plan for getting a workable currency in circulation gain was also rough-and-ready but practical. As soon as enough gold, cupro-nickel and bronze had been coined, distribution would start, as simultaneously as possible; £100 to each man, woman, and child in Britain, against a thumb-printed and signed receipt (parents or guardians signing for children under sixteen). That should be enough to start the replacement of clumsy barter by cash trade, though it might lean a certain temporary revival of brigandage, but district posses were being organized to deal with that. The funding f government, special allowances, loans to capitalize cooperatives, paper currency once confidence was established – all these could be decided upon in due course by Parliament.

The power workers were very busy. The nuclear submarine-type generators at the London Beehive, and at each of the regional hives, were being rehabilitated as fast as the few available experts could deal with them, for linking the National Grid which other gangs were working hard to restore on Surface. Generation by oil or coal was out i the question, probably for many years ahead; but it looked as though it might be possible to restore one or two of the hydro-electric stations.

Any rehabilitation of the Mohowatt couples, even if had been practicable, was rejected out of hand.

Brenda and Gareth had returned to London, to organise the removal of her library to a suitable building near Bedford, as the nucleus of a conveniently central Nation Library. Both the British Museum Reading Room and the Bodleian at Oxford were unusable, but guards had to be placed on their ruins against the day when manpower could be enlisted to salvage what remained of their contents.

Philip, too, had been briefly recalled to Beehive to inspect the ventilation system and ensure that it would remain adequate for the people who were having to work there Betty had been unable to go with him, for they now had a month-old baby, but he had gone to their old cubicle at brought her back one or two of their personal belonging

Among them was a poster which now hung on the cabin wall: a Zodiac painting by Johfra, a winged Virgin carrying a stem of barley in one hand and a flame-enclosed crystal egg in the other. Behind her were tilled fields at an open sky and she was surrounded by numinous symbols which Philip felt he was beginning to understand.

On her face was a secret smile.