The committee had agreed gladly and of course there had been a lot of volunteer help for him when he started building. The helpers had noticed at once that the plans for the cabin were larger than would have been needed for a bachelor and a radio bench but had said nothing, taking their cue from Tonia's smiling inscrutability, since she was not usually one to keep silent about anything that occupied her thoughts. When the cabin was finished, Geraint carted up his belongings from the village, culminating in a bed which was blatantly double. Tonia then abandoned the Spinster Shack and moved in with him. When somebody had commented on this with heavy-footed obliqueness, Tonia had said: 'Hell, we've been sleeping together for weeks, so why not do it in comfort? I love the guy and I guess he loves me. Any questions?'
There had been no questions. Mating was in the air at Camp Cerridwen; the tribal atmosphere, the survivalist way of thinking, the immediacy of manifested nature, all seemed to stimulate it. One or two of the partnerships, Moira feared, had been a little too hastily formed and sexual rivalry and jealousy were the predominant cause of such conflict as the camp suffered; but this she knew was natural and inevitable and she and Dan were reluctant to exert their influence unless things were getting out of hand or to give their advice unless it was asked for. When the people concerned were witches their own covens could keep an eye on any potentially explosive situations, and when they were not, the witch leaders were particularly anxious to avoid any suggestion that they were trying to dictate to the minority on personal matters.
'I hope the camp never becomes too large,' Dan said at one of the Elders' meetings. 'We've pretty well reached our optimum size. Everybody still knows everybody else, even if sometimes it's only slightly. So we still work like an extended family. A lot of things get sorted out by tribal opinion which'd have to be legislated for formally if we were any bigger. And legislation has to be impersonal. Once that creeps in, the whole nature of things changes.'
'It can't last, though,' Sam Warner said. 'On a national scale, I mean, once Britain's re-populated – which'll happen a hell of a lot faster than it did in medieval times because we've got the memory and the technical knowledge of modern civilization. We'll be instinctively moving towards it again, even if most of us don't really want to. Three or four generations and we'll be back in the old groove – or at least the beginnings of it.'
"Hardly our immediate problem,' his wife put in.
'I'm not so sure, love. Look – right now Britain's a land of small tribal communities and so's the whole bloody world if Geraint and Tonia's news sheets are anything to go by. And whatever's evolving inside those communities will have a big influence on what evolves out of them. The tribes and their-ways of thinking and living will be the bricks with which any new State will be built. And the mortar will be the memory of urban civilization plus salvaged technical knowledge. So what tribes like ours are doing right now is important for the future. It could determine the whole shape of the building.'
'Don't forget,' Greg said, 'that the bricks might get hit by a shower of mortar without warning any time. And it could be very uncomfortable.'
Moira laughed, 'When you lot have finished with the metaphors – what do you mean, Greg? Beehive coming out and taking charge?'
'Of course I mean bloody Beehive. Their way of thinking will be completely old-establishment. Probably nineteenth-century establishment, at that, because they'll have tightened up into a military and administrative clique convinced they've got a divine right to rule.'
'With a nasty extra dimension, though,' Moira pointed out. 'If Gareth Underwood was right about Harley – that he's not just made a strategic alliance with the Angels of Lucifer but got involved in black magic himself – Gareth's actual words were "hooked on it"
‘Well.'
Sam asked: 'What do you think that will mean in practice, Moira?'
'Dan and I have been thinking about it a lot,' Moira told him. 'All winter we've been picking up the Angels of Lucifer every now and then, but they've never been more than probing attacks, have they? It hasn't taken too much effort to fend them off. They've never tried a real psychic offensive, the sort of thing they did at the Banwell Unit against Ben Stoddart. We'd have known if they had. And frankly, after Underwood's warning we expected them to. So what are they waiting for? We think they're waiting till Beehive's ready to come out. That they'll synchronize their all-out attack with that.'
'Will we be able to hold it?'
'We will, Sam. We've got to believe we will or we're weakened from the start. But more than that – we've got to be ready to hit back. You know the rule: if you're under psychic attack, put up your defences and if the defences are strong enough the attack will bounce back on the attacker.'
'The Boomerang Effect.'
'Precisely. And in ordinary circumstances, white magic must confine itself to that and leave what happens to the aggressor to the Lords of Karma. Anything more than that is black. But there are times, particularly when thousands of innocent people are threatened, when the Boomerang Effect – or even binding – isn't enough, and deliberate counter-attack is called for. Only your conscience can tell you that… You may even have to hit first, once you know the attack is being prepared. And our conscience tells us that one of those times is on its way. Does anyone disagree?'
Several of them said 'No' emphatically and the rest shook their heads. Liz asked: 'Are we strong enough to mount an attack?… No, I don't quite mean that – we've got the strength all right but are we organized to do it? Psychic attack isn't exactly a thing we've trained ourselves for.'
'Haven't we? We attack disease often enough by launching concerted power at it from the coven working together. We've been taught not to launch it against people but if we have to, the technique's the same.'
'All right – but you say "from the coven". How about fourteen covens? What do we do – work under you and Dan as one giant coven? Or in separate covens but at the same time? Either way we ought to know about it and be ready. Even practise it somehow, if we can find a way of doing that without alerting the Angels of Lucifer.'
Moira looked at Dan. Time to tell them our suggestion, don't you think?' ‘yes, love, I do.'
'Right, then. We think we need a psychic assault group -and here's how it would work…’
22
Without Karen's help, Harley knew, the situation might have been far worse. Not that the putsch would actually have succeeded, of course; that was unthinkable. The gods had not put supreme power into Sir Reginald Harley's hands to mock him. His mission was inexorable because only to him had the vision of Destiny been fully revealed, the vision of a Britain purged and cleansed of its degenerate multitudes, a purified stock on to which he, Harley, was to graft the future, a wiped slate on which only he could write. Yet the gods still had their secrets, which they unveiled to him, their chosen instrument, layer by layer as the time was ripe. And he had no doubt that Colonel Davidson's attempted mutiny and Karen's part in rooting it out, had been such a lesson. There is poison within as well as without, the gods had been telling him; the human battalions which were his instruments of Destiny must be immaculate, worthy of their task, before the next step on the ordained path could be taken. The lesson had confirmed, as well, what he had already partly understood – that to fulfil his mission he needed his complement, the Dark Angel the gods had sent to him, Kali to his Siva, the magical consort of the bright male destroyer-creator.
He wondered sometimes (though he seldom thought of her now) how he had ever been content with Brenda. He had believed she had satisfied his masculinity. But that had been in the old half-blind days when he had relegated male-ness to a mere biological function, instead of the godlike creative essence which Karen had taught him it was. Their first coupling, a transformatory experience for him, had been on her second visit to Beehive. Since then she had come every month. John, she assured him, had been easily persuaded of the need for these visits, for there was much to plan between Harley and the Angels of Lucifer and the ma
terial benefits to the Angels had been immediate and continuing. But her real purpose had been the magical training of Harley and to this he had surrendered himself wholeheartedly, discovering in it a new dimension of power and awareness. Analytical habit had made him ask himself, at first, whether this was an illusion engendered by sexual euphoria. He had even put the question to her for she was always urging frankness in him.
Karen had smiled. 'Illusion? All right, let's try an experiment. Has anyone annoyed you today?'
'Annoyed?… My God, yes. Our so-called Prime Minister. He does as he's told, of course – but it's when he's trying to help that he's most disastrous. He created quite unnecessary problems at this morning's conference by sheer stupidity.'
'Right. Let's teach him a lesson… Make love to me, Reggie. But slowly.'
He was briefly taken aback by the apparent irrelevance but soon forgot about it. She conducted their mutual arousal with her usual (though never repetitive) skill and once he had entered her, commanded him to keep still. He obeyed, astonished at his own control, and she kept talking to him softly, unmoving herself. How long they stayed thus, he could not tell; locked in a motionless intimacy, tension mounting to an unbelievable pitch and then still higher, a mystical rapture in which body and mind and spirit were indistinguishable, a trance of almost intolerable brilliance which could not continue yet must not be broken…
Karen whispered: 'Picture him. Picture the Prime Minister. Hold his image in your mind…Now, command him to be silent. For a night and a day he cannot speak. We command him. Hold the image and the command, right through the orgasm. Are you ready?'
'Yes.'
'Now!' – and in that instant her pelvis began thrusting. They cried out together in a tornado of release, but somehow, he managed to hold on to the image and the command. He felt exhausted of every atom of his strength and it was minutes before he could even summon up enough strength to dismount her.
'How long did that take?' he wondered at last. ‘I haven't the remotest idea.'
She glanced at her watch, relaxedly matter-of-fact. 'Just under an hour.'
'It was incredible… Will it work?'
'Of course it will.'
She spoke with complete confidence but Harley still found himself nervous, next morning, about calling on the Prime Minister. He found the doctor.with him, puzzled by a complete loss of voice which nevertheless had none of the other symptoms of acute laryngitis. The patient's voice came back suddenly, and equally completely, at half past ten that evening. The doctor bluffed an explanation, not daring to mention the word 'hysteria'.
Harley never doubted Karen again.
It was during her May visit that he asked her help in questioning Colonel Davidson. The colonel had been caught red-handed, in treasonable conference with one of his captains, a lieutenant and a signal corps sergeant. The lieutenant had been the weak link in the plot, some unguarded words of his arousing the suspicions of a lance-corporal who was in fact one of Intelligence Section's 'ears' in the Army. The Section had planted a bug in the colonel's quarters and had pounced on the conspirators next time they met, as soon as they had said enough to condemn themselves. In their enthusiasm the section had incurred Harley's wrath, for as he pointed out, they had pounced too soon. 'For God's sake – if you'd given them a bit more rope they'd have hanged others as well as themselves. They're only the ringleaders and I want everybody. You'd better get names out of them and fast.'
The Section had got to work. After twenty-four hours Davidson had still said nothing except to rail at Harley as 'a witch-ridden megalomaniac'. The implications of a leak about his relations with Savernake Forest had alarmed Harley and he had ordered the interrogators to be less squeamish in their methods. This proved unfortunate, for the lieutenant died under questioning, and the captain and the sergeant, who had been brought in to watch what to expect when their turn came, somehow managed to commit suicide in their cells.
Left only with Davidson, who seemed impossible to crack, Harley did some rapid thinking.
Colonel Davidson, bruised and aching though he was, knew better than to be surprised when he was cleaned up, brought a fresh uniform, given a good meal, and taken under escort to Harley's private quarters where the escort handcuffed him to a chair and left. Here comes the softening-up bit, the sweet reasonableness, the proffered deal, he told himself. God damn Harley, that won't get him anywhere, either.
Harley came into the room, a young woman with long black hair at his side. So that's the Black Mamba, Davidson thought, deliberately ignoring her. The colonel's own spies had been efficient.
'I'm sorry about the handcuffs,' Harley said pleasantly. ‘I’d have done without them but my watchdogs won't let me. They insist on you being physically harmless before they'll leave you alone with me.'
'How right they are,' the colonel told him.
'Come now, Colonel, the time's past for dramatic gestures. So pointless. Your conspiracy has lost its leaders and hasn't a chance of succeeding. You may disapprove of me but I'm sure you'll agree that with your chance gone, even my regime is preferable to anarchy. So why not be sensible and cooperate?'
'With you – and that!' He jerked his head towards the woman.
The woman laughed.
Apparently unruffled, Harley went on and on, calm, reasonable, placatory. The colonel was puzzled. He sensed that it was all meaningless, that Harley knew perfectly well it would not succeed but that he was continuing the interview for some hidden purpose.
The woman just sat there, unspeaking, a faint smile on her face. In spite of himself, the colonel found himself glancing again and again in her direction, drawn by that face, drawn by those eyes. They were an unusual shape; the colonel, who knew his Far East, was certain there was no oriental blood in her but could understand why people thought there might be. And the size of them… the depth…
He was back in his cell, sitting bolt upright with a start.
When they had dressed him for the interview, they had given him back his watch. It was still on his wrist and he looked at it incredulously. He had lost at least an hour and a half, between succumbing to those great eyes and receiving the mental order to wake up. He knew it had been a mental order; he could still feel the impact of it, the quality of mocking triumph, even the femaleness of its sender.
What had he said before he was led back to the cell? In that hour and a half, what names had he given, what plans explained, what good men and women betrayed? Had black sorcery achieved what torture could not?
Colonel Davidson could only feel, with an awful certainty, that the pockets of his mind had been picked, emptied, rifled. For the first time in years he lowered his face on to his hands and wept.
General Mullard, anxious about morale, wanted the executions to be carried out secretly. But Harley decided otherwise. Seven officers, twenty-three other ranks and nine civilians were marched, handcuffed, for half a kilometre along frequented corridors to a large empty store-room, where they were led in and dealt with four at a time. The firing squad had been picked by Harley personally from the Hub Defence Battalion which was known colloquially as 'the Big Chief's Own'. Thirty-nine prisoners, four at a time, meant ten volleys, which echoed down the Beehive corridors for quite a distance. Six of the thirty-nine had been women.
At the same hour, five were executed in the Cardiff Beehive and two at the Norwich one, the only places outside London where Davidson had managed to plant supporters.
There were no more conspiracies and informing on even flippant critics of Harley's regime became a normal self-defensive reaction. General Milliard, a little grudgingly, admitted to Harley that he had been right.
Brenda, no longer in Harley's confidence, had known nothing of the would-be putsch until the mass arrests had included one of her own library assistants. Within an hour, news of the swoop had been all round Beehive and it had been a nerve-racking hour for Brenda, quite apart from her distress over the assistant whom she had liked and known for years. She was frightened b
oth for herself and for Gareth. She expected to be picked up and questioned because of her closeness to the arrested assistant and she had feared that Gareth might be involved in the conspiracy. She did not think he was but knowing his secret views she had to face the possibility of it and of his having hidden the fact from her for her own safety. But no questioning occurred, then or afterwards, and Gareth rang up her up with a routine library query the obvious purpose of which was to let her know that he was not in trouble.
He came to her room that evening and, signalling to her to be careful, began a meticulous search for any newly installed microphone. Brenda understood and kept up a harmless conversation till he had finished.
'All clear,' he announced at last. 'I was pretty certain you hadn't been bugged since the last time I looked, when the Chief chucked you out – but with all this going on, I'd rather be quite sure… I heard about your chap Farmer. I really am sorry about him. Been with you a long time, hadn't he?'
‘Yes, he had… Were you…?' She did not know quite how to put it.
'In on the round-up? No, love, I wasn't. I knew Davidson and the other three had been arrested, the other day, but the whole business suddenly became very hush-hush.
No one in the Section was told what was going on except the people actually working on it. Next thing the rest of us knew was this morning when the other thirty-eight were pulled in simultaneously.'
"What'll happen to them, Gareth?'
'The charge is treason, Brenda. Every single one of them, including your pal – I'm sorry, love.'
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