The camp-fire was very welcome in the evenings, for the first chill of autumn was in the air. They dug a second hearth 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.)
Geraint found them more depressed than usual this evening; it had been a tiresome day, full of problems and false starts, and everyone seemed to feel that not much progress had been made. Nor had a gusty wind and a couple of rain-showers improved tempers.
'We've got to get the first cabin roofed and weathertight pretty bloody soon,' Greg was grumbling, 'so we can get cracking on the cook-house. We can't have the girls cooking in the open once the winter sets in.'
'We can always cook in the caravans,' Angie said.
'And use up all our gas bottles when we've got a wood-burning range? Not bloody likely. Anyhow, the caravans are bedrooms. Ought to keep 'em for that, if we're going to have any kind of comfort.'
'I know today's been a bad day. But you'll get it done.'
'If we have a month of rain?' Greg asked gloomily.
Geraint listened for another minute of semi-bickering and then interrupted: 'At least you can get on with it. D'you realize what it's like outside? Damn lucky you are and we in the village, too – tucked away in a defensible cul-de-sac. You should listen to my ham friends.'
Everybody fell silent. They were well aware that the Madness had become, by unspoken agreement, almost a taboo subject at Camp Cerridwen. It was now a fortnight since the first madmen had been shot in New Dyfnant, and at the Camp only Dan, Greg and Peter knew, from the villagers, how many had since been shot at the barracades on the two approach roads – forty-three men, women and children so far. More than one villager who had hitherto been regarded as tough had had to be taken off the sentry roster, because he had come home from a necessary execution sick and trembling. And those forty-three could only have been a random handful of the insane, because they wandered aimlessly with no evidence of the purposeful seeking of shelter. Any who came up the approach roads did so by chance and against the odds, for the main road was steep and the other one winding and long. Only Geraint Lloyd, crouched for hours on end over his radio exchanging piecemeal local news with his fellow-hams, had any kind of perspective of the overall picture.
Dan and Greg had good reason to keep the news to themselves and they had no difficulty in persuading Peter to do the same. As in most witch covens, so in theirs, it was the women on the whole who were the more psychically sensitive; Moira unusually so even for an experienced High Priestess, Sally to a lesser degree but consistently, while Rosemary's came and went unpredictably but could at times find her painfully vulnerable. Greg seemed resigned to the fact that, after years of trying, he still 'couldn't pick up a bloody thing' – but he nevertheless had great psychic power which the others could tap, and with which he could surround Rosemary, in her vulnerable moments, like a wall. Dan himself was more mentally than psychically sensitive, so although he did not 'pick up' a great deal, he was remarkably astute at interpreting what he did pick up (a process in which many otherwise gifted clairvoyants mar their own gift).
From the first days of the Madness, the sheer magnitude of the violence raging in the psychic atmosphere, as it did over the physical Earth, had hung over the women's aware-nes like a thundercloud. On the fifth day after the earthquake, the astral shock-wave had hit them. Moira, shaking, had ordered a Circle; Dan had taken one look at her and assumed command (a thing he very rarely did), casting it himself. He had included everyone but Father Byrne; to the priest he had explained quickly what they were doing and why, and had suggested that he might be happier -and more effective – in the caravan confronting the powers of darkness in his own way. Father Byrne, who was anything but insensitive himself, had nodded, said 'God bless you all', and gone not to his caravan but to the little open-air sanctuary he had made for himself in a clearing in the forest. Dan had then taken charge of the building up of their psychic defences; Angie, Eileen and Peter had cooperated willingly and very soon the whole group had felt stronger and calmer. Moira, rejuvenated, had taught the non-witches the basics of psychic self-defence – concentrating particularly on Eileen, who although quite untrained in psychic manners was all too factually aware of the nature of the Madness and therefore specially vulnerable.
Since then, everybody had borne up well during the day and a nightly Circle had been cast around the camp to protect their sleep. (Dan, half-teasingly, asked Father Byrne if he minded sleeping inside it. Father Byrne had replied that if God had forgiven Naaman for the political necessity of bowing down in the House of Rimmon, He would doubtless forgive a somewhat aged priest for the domestic necessity of sleeping in it. He had then hastily added that he was only joking and that as far as he was concerned, the camp was protected by a circle of love and goodwill which was more important than the formula used.) And when Peter brought back the first news of the grim operation at the barricades, he had readily agreed with Dan and Greg that it should be kept from the women unless and until it was necessary to give it to them. 'They're our psychic antennae,' Dan-had said. 'Let's keep the air as clear as we can for them.'
Nevertheless it was Moira who asked tonight: 'It's really bad, Geraint, isn't it?'
The schoolmaster nodded. 'I'm afraid so, Moira… In the first week after the earthquake, I was in touch with eighteen hams still operating in Britain and two in Ireland. Now I'm in touch with five British and one Irish. That's fourteen gone. Four of the British and the Irishman lived in coastal areas so they'd announced they were getting out; whether they got clear, God knows.' He looked apologetically at Eileen. 'I hope you don't mind – but they are all my friends, even if I've never met most of 'em, so I tipped 'em off about the vinegar masks in time. So no one got caught that way. And the Irish knew in any case. But that's still nine out of the twenty who survived the earthquake but have since disappeared – and none of the others picked up a signing-off message from any of them, though we'd all promised to broadcast one if we could… And all those nine were in bad areas, big towns and so on… Some of them had pretty dreadful stories to tell, locally -and the ones who are left are still telling them. We're damn lucky here. We hate what we're having to do at the barricades – but that's nothing to what's happening in the towns and the open country. The sane minority are having to kill the insane majority, whenever they meet face to face. Either that or get killed themselves. And since not one in a thousand of the sane ones has a gun or anything, a hell of a lot of 'em are getting killed…… Ireland's been better off, as far as my friend there can tell me, because they got the Dust warning and only a small minority were caught by it. But about half their population, North and South, live in seaports, and the casualties there must have been ghastly. It looks as though Ireland got the tidal waves first, and worst, on top of earthquakes just as bad as ours… Can't tell you much about the rest of the world yet, I'm afraid. I've been too busy trying to build up the British Isles picture and cooperating with the other hams to do it. Anyway, long-range radio conditions were lousy after the quake and they're only improving slowly. But from the odd contacts I have had, I'd say our state of affairs is pretty typical It's like the end of the world.'