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 material 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.