'The Russian Steppes?'
'Laugh if you like. You always were one for laughing. You've never had a serious thought in your life. You've gone over lock stock and barrel to the bloody English.'
'I am bloody English. So are you.' Hillier started. 'What's that noise?'
'Rain, that's all, just rain. Not the piddling little rain of England and the measly little bit of English sun. It's not like that here. Here it's all big stuff.'
Big stuff. Rain beat on the roof like the fists of a people's revolution. 'This rain is perfect,' said Hillier. 'This is just the weather for a get-away.'
'That's right,' said Roper. 'Capitalist intrigues and ambushes and spyings and wars. Guns and get-away cars. Disguises. If I went back to the West they wouldn't use me for the conquest of space. Oh, no. Has England ever tried to put a man into space? Don't make me laugh,' he said grimly.
'We can't afford it,' shouted Hillier. The rain was near-deafening.
'No,' shouted Roper back. He was looking a lot better, as if all he'd needed was rain. 'But you can afford to be in bloody NATO and have spies and ICBMs and-Here.' He fumbled in an inner pocket. 'Here, read this.' It was a curling photostat of something. 'Whenever I start weakening and thinking of the bloody village green and British tommies nursing babies and what they call justice and democracy and fair play – whenever I think of the House of Commons and Shakespeare and the Queen's corgis 1 have a look at this. Read it, go on, read it.'
'Look, Roper, we haven't got time-'
'If you don't read it I'll scream for help.'
'You're screaming already. Russian rain isn't on your side. What is it, anyway?'
'It's an extract from Hearne's British Martyrs. Not a book I'd ever met before. But they had it in Moscow. Read it.'
Hillier read: 'Edward Roper was drawn to the marketplace in a cart. A large crowd had collected and there were many children whom their parents had brought along for the bloody, or fiery, entertainment. When Roper appeared, dressed only in shirt and trunks and hose, a great cry was raised: Have at the caitiff, he is a blasphemer, death to heresy, to the flames with him, etc. Roper smiled, even bowed, but this was taken as an impudent mockery and it intensified the clamour of vilification. Men piled kindling round the stake; it would take quickly, for the weather had long been dry. Roper, still smiling, was pushed towards it, but he said in a voice clear and unwavering: "If I cannot avoid my fate then I will walk towards it with no rough impulsion. Leave me be." And so he made his way with steady step and unhandled by the gross ministers of his martyrdom to the waiting stake, arm of Christ's tree. Before they bound him to it, he took from the bosom of his shirt a single red rose and said: "Let not this emblem of Her Majesty and of the royal house which bore her perish with me. I pray that she and her kin and indeed all her subjects, however misguided and naughtily blind to the light, may escape the fire." Whereupon he cast the rose, a full-blown June one, into the crowd, which knew not what to do with it. If they rent and dispetalled it, as having lain in the breast of a heretic and traitor, that would have been a kind of lèse-majesté. They seemed anxious to rid themselves of it while leaving it unscathed, so it passed swiftly to the back of the mob, where one took it and it was not seen again, though it has been said that it was kept pressed as a token of martyrdom in a book of devotions later lost. Roper was now asked if he would make his peace with God before the kindling was touched with the brand that was ready and waiting. He said: "See how that flame dissolves in the sunlight. It is a sad thing to be leaving the sun, but I know that I shall dissolve, through the agony of my burning, into the greatest sun of all. As for prayer, I pray that the Queen and this whole realm be brought back, in God's good time, to the true faith whereof I am, though bad and unworthy, a steadfast witness." At that moment the sun disappeared into the clouds, and some of the mob grew frightened as if this was a portent. And then the sun emerged again and they renewed their shouts and jeers. Roper, bound to the stake like a bear, said gaily: "Let me taste your fire. If I cry out it will be but my body crying, not my soul. I pity my poor body, as Christ on the cross must have pitied his, and in a manner beg forgiveness of it. But it will be the true witness and these impending flames ennoble it. God bless you all." He composed himself to prayer and the kindling took quickly, the crowd groaning and shouting the while though some little children cried. The fire was built up speedily with dry twigs and branches and soon small logs, and the body of Edward Roper tasted the fire. He screamed high and loud as his garments blazed, then his skin, then his flesh. Then through the smoke and flames his disfigured head, the hair an aureole, was seen to loll. Mercifully soon his death was consummated. The mob waited, in a double sweat of sun and fire, till the roasted flesh and inner organs, including the stout heart, fell into the fire, hissing and cooking; they waited till the executioner crushed the blackened bones into a powder. Then they went home or about their business, and it was noted that many who had cried out on Roper the most loud were now reduced to silence. So it may have been that the work of a martyr or witness to the light was already beginning.'
Hillier looked up, inevitably moved. Roper said: 'Not all this Russian rain can quench those flames.' Hillier said: 'This took place in 1558, did it?'
'You know it did.' The rain had grown discouraged; the fists on the roof beat more feebly.
'And it seems to have taken place in summer.'
'Yes. You can see that from the rose and the sun and the sweat. Dirty English bastards, defiling a summer's day.'
'Well,' said Hillier, 'you bloody fool, it didn't happen in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth didn't come to the throne till the November of 1558. The Queen that put your ancestor to death was Bloody Mary. You bloody benighted idiot, Roper. Curse your stupidity, you stupid idiot. Your ancestor was a witness for the Protestant faith.'
'That's not true. That can't be true.' Roper was very pale; the eye-twitch went like clockwork; he started to hiccup again: ikota ikota.
'You call yourself a bloody scientist, but you haven't even the sense to look up the facts. Your family must have been late converts, and then this story must have passed into their archives, all wrong, totally bloody wrong. Oh, you incredible idiot.'
'You're lying. Where's your ikota evidence?'
'In any reference book. Look it up tomorrow, unless, of course, your Russian pals have kindly falsified history for you. In any case, what difference does it make whether he was burned by a Catholic or a Protestant queen? It was still the foul and filthy English, wasn't it? You can still go on feeling bitter and fuelling rockets to point against the nasty treacherous West. But you're still a bloody unscientific fool.'
'But ikota-But ikota ikota-They've always said that Catholicism would have been on thé right lines if it hadn't been for the religious ikota content. Capitalism they said was ikota a Protestant thing. I won't have it that he died for capitalism ikota. Something's gone wrong somewhere. Your history ikota books have gone all wrong.'
'What your pals do, Roper, is to choose an approach appropriate to their subject. They found the right one for you all right. And they knew you wouldn't have any historical dates among your scientific tomes. And, anyway, it won't alter things for you even now, will it? You're committed, aren't you, you silly bastard?'
Roper's hiccups suddenly stopped, but the twitch went on. 'I suppose you could say that Protestantism was the first of the great revolutions. I must think this out when I get time. Somebody said that somewhere, in some book or other, I can't remember the name. That world peace and the classless society could only come about through the death agony of an older order.'