Omega

'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.'

'So Reggie’ll have them shot. Oh, my God… Who else will they find?'

'My guess is no one. With a thing this size, I know how the Section works. If they did expect ramifications, every last one of us would be on overtime, questioning the prisoners' contacts. But we're not. It was neat, quick and complete. I know the signs and I'd bet a year's pay they're satisfied they've rounded up everybody. One of the leaders must have talked and convinced them he'd left nothing out. Don't ask me how. It's all very untypical.'

'I did wonder myself,' Brenda admitted. 'When they arrested Jerry Fanner, they didn't question me or any of the staff. They didn't even search his desk. Just took him away…' She smiled bitterly. 'A grilling was the least I expected, now that I'm out of favour… Though it's a couple of months now since Reggie dropped me. I suppose I'm not even "out of favour" any more. Just unimportant.'

'Not to me,' Gareth said quietly.

'I know… Why do you put up with me, Gareth? I use you as an emotional punching-bag and you never complain.'

He shook his head diffidently and after a while he asked: 'Do you still miss him?'

T wish I could answer that one,' she said, frowning. 'I just don't know. Sometimes I think I miss the man he used to be – but how much of that is really nostalgia for the old days, before the earthquakes and the witch-hunt and the Dust?… I thought I'd miss the status of being Madame Pompadour, with everyone afraid of offending me. But I don't. There's no real satisfaction in having everyone scared of you. I thought the wolves'd be on me as soon as I fell from grace – but do you know what, Gareth? Most of them just steered clear of me, as though I were going round with a bell crying "unclean, unclean"… And the real people were much more relaxed with me, as though I'd rejoined the human race… The worst time was in between, when I knew that bitch had taken him over already but he kept me on out of habit – when she wasn't in Beehive, at least. I was humiliated but I was as stubborn as hell. I was not going to give in to her… You said he "chucked me out". He never actually did, Gareth. Just treated me as part of the furniture till the humiliation outweighed the stubbornness. Do you know how it happened in the end? We'd come back to his quarters together and I let us in with my key. I always kept it separate from my key-ring – don't know why, caution I suppose. Anyway, he was being emptily charming, talking about nothing and not thinking of me at all and all of a sudden I hated him for excluding me. I put down the key on the table – sort of instinctive gesture of rejection. I went to pour a drink and when I came back the key had gone. I had a feeling he wanted me to… to abase myself by asking for it back. I couldn't. He went on being emptily charming, as though nothing had happened – he still is, if we meet by accident. I never went back and we never mention the fact.' She smiled unpleasantly. 'My God, Gareth, if I were a black witch I'd have his wax image right here, stuck full of rusty nails. Hers, too. Does that mean I miss him? Go on, psychoanalyse me.'

He shook his head again. 'I almost wish you were a black witch. You'd be doing the country a service.'

'Don't tempt me…' Her smiled faded. With your, dangerous thoughts, I'm surprised you weren't in there with Colonel Davidson. Thank God you weren't. I'd as sure as hell miss you'

'No, Brenda. When the time comes, that won't be my way of fighting him.'

Brenda took a deep breath.

'Our way, Gareth,' she said.

23

'I sometimes wonder,' Norman Godwin told his wife, 'why the hell we ever took on this bloody Castle.'

'You've been wondering that every week for months -and you know very well why,' Fay said.

The early sunshine bathed the perfect mandala of the sunken garden, below the East Terrace on which they stood, and softened the massiveness of the thousand-year-old fortress of Windsor at their backs. The lawns of the quartered circle were not as immaculate as they had once been, certainly; but they were still not bad, for the Castle group kept them mown on a rota system, as a labour of love. Only one feature was new – the two-metre-wide altar, neatly built of stone blocks, where the north-pointing path of the equal-armed cross met the outer circular path. The ornamental pond at the centre, too, was kept meticulously clear of floating leaves.

'It might really have been designed as an outdoor witches' temple,' Norman mused.

'You've said that before, too.'

Norman smiled. 'Stop taking the mickey, girl. You were the one who spotted it in the first place.'

They stood brooding, remembering the day they had come; the three covens from Slough, banding together for defence through the worst of the Madness, with friends and families making up nearly sixty people. They had been lucky to survive, for this part of the Thames Valley had been hit hard; and they had owed that survival to the nostalgia of a middle-aged woman from County Limerick. Maeve Kiernan was a quiet hard-working member of the Godwins' own coven, who had lived in Slough for thirty years or more, but who still tuned in to the Radio Eireann news almost every day. So she had picked up the Taoiseach's announcement on vinegar-masks days before the earthquake – and those who listened to her had escaped the Dust. Apart from the covens and their immediate friends, there had been few enough to listen; for the anti-witch mania was intense locally and on one occasion Maeve had narrowly escaped lynching as a panic-mongering witch when she had bravely stood up and tried to pass her news to a cinema audience.

The defensive band, practically unarmed, had fled from Slough in convoy during the demented hand-to-hand fighting, and dodging fissures, had found themselves at the gate of the Castle. Strangely, there had been few people about and those that there were had been busy fighting each other. The band had managed to lock themselves in the Round Tower, where they had been unassailable, till the peace of death had settled on the turmoil outside.

They had emerged and decided to make Windsor Castle their home.

That it was defensible was a strong argument in favour; the heating problem was a strong argument against and had troubled them throughout the winter and spring -hence Norman's remark after an unseasonably cold May night. They had managed, somehow, to find enough small rooms as living accommodation which could be kept reasonably warm and yet were close enough together to be defensible. By some freak of geology, the Castle hill had been barely touched by the earthquake, which had inflicted no more than a few cracks in the Castle's inner walls and caused the partial collapse of the Salisbury Tower – though nearby Eton was a desert of rubble and fire had destroyed.most of Windsor. The Castle, although cold, was a fortified oasis.

But that, they knew, had not been the real reason why they had stayed. They were surrounded, almost too profusely, by a millenium of the history of their now-decimated people and its hold on them grew as the days passed. If they abandoned it, rats and vandals, broken windows and damp, perhaps fire from careless nomads, would make short work of much of it. Almost without debate, they were overtaken by a compulsion to become its de facto guardians.