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Chapter Twenty-Seven
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Song to the Men of England’
The mood that afternoon was one of nervous apprehension. Like children who had kicked over an ants’ nest, they now watched fearfully to see how awful the ramifications would be. Hours had passed. Surely the escaped professors had liaised with city policymakers by now. Surely London had read those pamphlets by now. What form would the backlash take? They had all spent years trusting in the impenetrability of the tower; its wards, until now, had shielded them from everything. Still, it felt as if they were counting down the minutes to a vicious retaliation. ‘They have to send in the constables,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Even if they can’t get in. There will be some attempted arrest, surely. If not for the strike, then for—’ She glanced at Victoire, blinked, and trailed off.
There was a brief silence. ‘The strike is illegal too,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The Combination of Workmen Act of 1825 suppresses the right to strike by trade unions and guilds.’ ‘We’re not a guild, though,’ said Robin. ‘Actually, we are,’ said Yusuf, who worked in Legal. ‘It’s in the founding documents. Babel alums and students comprise the Translator’s Guild by virtue of their institutional affiliation, so by holding a strike we are in violation of the law, if you want to get technical about it.’ They looked round at each other, and then all at once burst out laughing.
But their good humour faded quickly. The association between their strike and the trade unions left a bad taste in all of their mouths, for the workers’ agitations of the 1830s – brought about directly as the result of the silver industrial revolution – had met with resounding failure. The Luddites had ended up either dead or exiled to Australia. The Lancashire spinners were forced back to work to avoid starvation within a year. The Swing Rioters, by smashing threshing machines and setting barns on fire, had secured a temporary improvement in wages and working conditions, but these were promptly reneged upon; more than a dozen rioters were hanged, and hundreds were sent to penal colonies in Australia.
Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers – white strikers, no less – had failed?
There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum.
The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse. Silver-powered looms and spinning machines were getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, enriching none but factory owners and financiers. Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.
And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over. There were no alternatives to Babel, no scabs.
No one else could do what they did. Britain could not function without them.
If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.
Still no policemen had appeared by evening. This lack of response baffled them. But soon logistical problems – namely, supplies and accommodation – became the more pressing matters at hand. It was clear now that they were going to be in the tower for quite some time, with no clear end date to their strike. At some point they were going to run out of food.
There was a tiny, rarely used kitchen in the basement, where servants had once lived before the Institute stopped housing its janitorial staff for free.
Occasionally scholars ducked downstairs for a snack when working late. A foray into the cabinets produced a decent amount of nonperishables – nuts, preserves, indestructible tea biscuits, and dry oats for porridge. It wasn’t much, but they wouldn’t starve overnight. And they found many, many bottles of wine, left over from years of faculty functions and garden parties. ‘Absolutely not,’ said Professor Craft when Juliana and Meghana proposed bringing the bottles upstairs. ‘Put those back. We need to keep our wits about us.’ ‘We need something to pass the time,’ said Meghana. ‘And if we’re going to starve to death, we may as well go out drunk.’ ‘They’re not going to starve us to death,’ Robin said. ‘They can’t allow us to die. They can’t hurt us. That’s the point.’ ‘Even so,’ said Yusuf. ‘We’ve just declared our intention to break the city. I don’t think we can just wander out for a hot breakfast, do you?’ Nor could they simply poke their heads outside and put in an order to the grocer’s. They had no friends in town, no one who could act as their liaison with the outer world. Professor Craft had a brother in Reading, but there was no way of getting a letter to him, and nor was there a safe way for him to deliver foodstuffs up to the tower. And Professor Chakravarti, it turned out, had a very limited relationship with Hermes – he’d been recruited only after his promotion to junior faculty, after his ties to upper faculty rendered him too risky for deeper involvement – and he knew Hermes only through anonymous letters and drop points. No one else had responded to their beacon. As far as they knew, they were the only ones left. ‘You two didn’t think of this before you broke into the tower and started waving guns around?’ asked Professor Chakravarti. ‘We were a bit distracted,’ said Robin, embarrassed. ‘We – really, we were making it up as we went along,’ said Victoire. ‘And we didn’t have much time.’ ‘Planning a revolution is not one of your strong suits.’ Professor Craft sniffed. ‘I shall see what I can do with the oats.’ Very soon a number of other problems arose. Babel was blessed with running water and indoor lavatories, but there was no place to shower. No one had an extra change of clothes, and there were of course no laundering
facilities – all of them had their washing done by invisible scouts. Apart from a single cot on the eighth floor, which was used as an unofficial nap space by the graduate fellows, there were no beds, pillows, linens, or anything that might make for comfortable bedding at night except for their own coats. ‘Think of it like this,’ Professor Chakravarti said in a valiant attempt to lift their mood. ‘Who doesn’t dream of living in a library? Is there not a certain romance to our situation? Who among us would balk at a completely
unhindered life of the mind?’ No one, it seemed, shared this fantasy. ‘Can’t we just duck out in the evenings?’ asked Juliana. ‘We can sneak out past midnight and be back by morning, no one will notice—’ ‘That’s absurd,’ said Robin. ‘This isn’t some kind of – of optional daytime activity—’ ‘We’re going to smell,’ said Yusuf. ‘It’ll be disgusting.’ ‘Still, we can’t just keep going in and out—’ ‘Just once then,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Just for supplies—’ ‘Stop it,’ snapped Victoire. ‘Just stop it, all of you, will you? We all chose treason against the Crown. We’ll be uncomfortable for some time yet.’
At half past ten, Meghana ran up from the lobby and breathlessly announced that London was sending a telegram. They crowded around the machine, watching nervously as Professor Chakravarti took down the message and transcribed it. He blinked at it for a moment, then said, ‘They’ve more or less told us to shove it.’ ‘What?’ Robin reached for the telegram. ‘There’s nothing else?’ ‘PLEASE REOPEN TOWER TO REGULAR BUSINESS STOP,’ read Professor
Chakravarti. ‘That’s all it says.’ ‘It’s not even signed?’ ‘I can only assume it’s coming direct from the Foreign Office,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘They don’t take private messages this late.’ ‘There’s no word about Playfair?’ Victoire asked. ‘Just the one line,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That’s it.’ So Parliament had declined to meet their demands – or indeed to take them seriously at all. Perhaps it was silly to hope the strike would produce a response so soon, before the lack of silver had taken effect, but they had
hoped at least that Parliament would acknowledge the threat. Did the MPs think this whole thing would blow over on its own? Were they trying to prevent a general panic? Was this why not a single policeman had knocked on the door, why the green outside was as serene and empty as it had ever
been? ‘What now?’ Juliana asked.
No one had an answer. They couldn’t help feeling somewhat petulant, like toddlers who’d thrown tantrums but had not been rewarded for their efforts. All that trouble for such a curt response – it all seemed so pathetic.
They lingered around the telegraph machine for a few more moments, hoping it might spring to life with better news – that Parliament was greatly concerned, that they’d called a midnight debate, that crowds of protestors had flooded Trafalgar Square to demand the war be called off. But the needle remained still. One by one they slunk back upstairs, hungry and dispirited.
For the rest of the evening, Robin would occasionally step out onto the rooftop to peer over the city, scanning for any indication of change or unrest.
But Oxford remained tranquil, undisturbed. Their pamphlets lay trodden in the street, stuck in grates, flapping pointlessly in the gentle night breeze. No one had even bothered to clean them up.
They had little to say to one another that night as they made their beds among the stacks, huddling under coats and spare gowns. The convivial atmosphere of that afternoon had vanished. They were all suffering the same unspoken, private fear, a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the unforgiving dark.
Magdalen Tower fell the next morning.
None of them had anticipated this. They only worked out afterwards what had happened, after they’d checked the work order ledgers and realized what they could have done to prevent it. Magdalen Tower, the second-tallest building in Oxford, had relied since the eighteenth century on silver- facilitated engineering tricks to support its weight after centuries of soil erosion had eaten at its foundations. Babel scholars did routine maintenance on its supports every six months, once in January and once again in June.
In the hours that followed the disaster, they would learn that it was Professor Playfair who had overseen these biannual reinforcements for the
past fifteen years, and whose notes on such procedures were locked in his office, inaccessible to the exiled Babel faculty, who had not even remembered Magdalen Tower’s upcoming appointment. They would find in their letterbox a flurry of messages from the panicked members of the city council who had expected Professor Playfair the previous evening, and who discovered only the next day that he was laid up in hospital, pumped full of laudanum and unconscious. They would learn that one council member had passed the early hours of the morning banging frantically at Babel’s door; only none of them heard or saw him, for the wards kept out all riffraff who might disrupt the scholars inside.
Meanwhile, the clock had run out on Magdalen Tower. At nine on the dot, a rumbling began at its base and spread through the entire city. At Babel, their teacups began clattering at breakfast. They thought they were experiencing an earthquake, until they rushed to the windows and saw that nothing was noticeably shaking except a single building in the distance.
Then they rushed to the rooftop and crowded around Professor Craft, who narrated what she saw from the telescope. ‘It’s – it’s breaking apart.’ By now the changes were so great they could be seen with the naked eye.
Tiles dripped off the roof like raindrops. Huge chunks of turrets peeled away and crashed to the ground.
Victoire asked what no one else dared. ‘Do you think anyone’s inside?’ If they were, at least they had ample time to get out. The building had been shaking for a good fifteen minutes now. This was their ethical defence; they did not let themselves consider the alternatives.
At twenty past nine, all ten of the tower’s bells began to ring at once, without rhythm or harmony. They seemed to grow louder, building up to a terrible level; they reached a crescendo with an urgency that made Robin himself want to scream.
Then the tower collapsed, as simply and cleanly as a sandcastle kicked at the base. It took less than ten seconds for the building to fall, but nearly a minute for the rumbling to settle. Then, where Magdalen Tower had once stood was a great mound of brick, dust, and stone. And it was somehow lovely, unnervingly lovely because it was so awful, because it violated the rules of how things were supposed to move. That the city’s horizon could, in an instant, be changed this dramatically was both breathtaking and awesome.
Robin and Victoire watched, hands clasped tight.
‘We did that,’ Robin murmured. ‘That’s not even the worst of it,’ said Victoire, and he could not tell if she was delighted or scared. ‘That’s only the beginning.’ So Griffin was right. This was what it took: a show of force. If the people could not be won over by words, they would be persuaded by destruction.
Parliament’s capitulation, they reasoned, was only hours away now. For wasn’t this proof that the strike was intolerable? That the city could not ride
out the tower’s refusal of service?
The professors were not so optimistic. ‘It won’t speed things along,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘If anything, it’ll slow the destruction down – they know they have to be vigilant now.’ ‘But it’s a harbinger of things to come,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Right? What falls next? The Radcliffe Camera? The Sheldonian?’ ‘Magdalen Tower was an accident,’ said Professor Craft. ‘But Professor Chakravarti is right. It’ll put the rest of them on guard, covering for the effects that we’ve halted. It’s a race against time now – they’ll have regrouped somewhere else, surely, and they will be trying to construct a new translation centre as we speak—’ ‘Can they do that?’ asked Victoire. ‘We’ve taken the tower. We have all the maintenance records, the tools—’ ‘And the silver,’ said Robin. ‘We have all the silver.’ ‘That will hurt, in time, but in the short term they will manage to plug the worst of the gaps,’ said Professor Craft. ‘They’ll wait us out – we have porridge for a week at most, Swift, and what then? We starve?’ ‘Then we speed things up,’ said Robin. ‘How do you propose to do that?’ asked Victoire. ‘Resonance.’ Professor Chakravarti and Professor Craft exchanged a glance. ‘How does he know about that?’ asked Professor Craft.
Professor Chakravarti gave a guilty shrug. ‘Might have shown him.’
‘Anand!’
‘Oh, what was the harm?’
‘Well, this, clearly—’ ‘What is resonance?’ Victoire demanded.
‘Up on the eighth floor,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s go, I’ll show you. It’s how the distant bars are maintained, the ones that aren’t made for endurance. The centre to the periphery. If we remove the centre, then surely they’ll begin to fail, won’t they?’ ‘Well, there’s a moral line,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Withholding services, resources – that’s one thing. But deliberate sabotage—’ Robin scoffed. ‘We’re splitting ethical hairs over this? This?’ ‘The city would stop running,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The country.
It would be Armageddon.’ ‘But that’s what we want—’ ‘You want enough damage to make the threat credible,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘And no more.’ ‘Then we’ll remove just a few at once.’ Robin stood up. His mind was made up. He did not want to debate this further, and he could see none of them did either; they were too anxious, and too afraid. They only wanted someone to tell them what to do. ‘One by one, until they get the general idea.
Would you like to pick which ones?’ The professors declined. Robin suspected it was too much for them to deconstruct the resonance rods by themselves, for they knew too well the consequences of what they did. They needed to preserve the illusion of innocence, or at least of ignorance. But they expressed no further opposition, and so that evening Robin and Victoire went together up to the eighth floor. ‘A dozen or so, do you think?’ Victoire suggested. ‘A dozen every day, and we’ll see if we need to scale up?’ ‘Perhaps two dozen to start,’ said Robin. There must have been hundreds of rods in the room. He had the impulse to kick them all down, to just grab one and use it to bat down the others. ‘Don’t we want to be dramatic?’ Victoire shot him a droll look. ‘There’s dramatic, and then there’s
reckless.’ ‘This whole endeavour is reckless.’ ‘But we don’t even know what one would do—’ ‘I only mean, we need to get their attention.’ Robin pressed a fist into a palm. ‘I want a spectacle. I want Armageddon. I want them to think that a dozen Magdalen Towers will fall every day until they listen to us.’ Victoire folded her arms. Robin didn’t like the way her eyes were searching him, as though she’d seized on some truth that he didn’t want to
admit out loud. ‘It’s not revenge, what we’re doing here.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Just so we’re clear.’ He chose not to mention Professor Playfair then. ‘I know that, Victoire.’ ‘Fine, then.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Two dozen.’ ‘Two dozen to start.’ Robin reached down and pulled the nearest resonance rod from its fixture. It slid out with surprising ease. He’d expected some resistance, some noise or transformation symbolizing the break. ‘Is it that simple?’ How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.
Victoire reached out at random and pulled out a second rod, and then a third. ‘I suppose we’ll see.’
And then, like a house of cards, Oxford began to crumble.
The rapidity of its deterioration was stunning. The next day, all the bell- tower clocks stopped running, all frozen at precisely 6.37 in the morning.
Later that afternoon, a great stink wafted over the city. It turned out silver had been used to facilitate the flow of sewage, which was now stuck in place, an unmoving mass of sludge. That evening, Oxford went dark. First one lamp- post started flickering, then another, and then another, until all of the lights on High Street went out. For the first time in the two decades since gas lamps were installed on its streets, Oxford passed the night shrouded in black. ‘What did you two do up there?’ Ibrahim marvelled. ‘We only took out two dozen,’ said Victoire. ‘Two dozen only, so how—’ ‘This is how Babel was designed to work,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘We made the city as reliant on the Institute as possible. We designed bars to last for only several weeks instead of months, because maintenance appointments bring in money. This is the cost of inflating prices and artificially creating demand. It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’ By the morning of the third day, transportation began breaking down.
Most of the carts in England used a variety of match-pairs that played with the concept of speed. The word speed in modern English was specific to a sense of rapidity, but as a number of common phrases – Godspeed, good speed to you – proved, the root meaning, deriving with the Latin spés,
meaning ‘to hope’, was associated with good fortune and success, with the broader sense of seeking one’s destination, of crossing great distances to reach one’s goal. Speed-based match-pairs using Latin, or in rare cases Old Slavic, allowed carriages to travel more quickly without risk of accident.
But drivers had become too accustomed to the bars, and thus did not correct for when they failed. Accidents multiplied. Oxford’s roads became blocked up with overturned wagons and cabs that had taken corners too tightly. Up in the Cotswolds a small family of eight tumbled straight into a ravine because the driver had got used to sitting back and letting the horses take over during tricky turns.
The postal system, too, ground to a halt. For years, Royal Mail couriers with particularly heavy loads had been using bars engraved with the French- English match-pair parcelle-parcel. Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotation of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package.
Fixing this bar to the postal carriage made the parcels seem a fraction of their true weight. But now these carriages, with horses straining under three times the load they were used to, were collapsing mid-route. ‘Do you think they’ve caught on yet that this is a problem?’ Robin demanded on the fourth day. ‘I mean, how long is it going to take for people to realize this won’t just go away on its own?’ But it was impossible to tell from within the tower. They had no way to gauge public opinion in either Oxford or London, except through the papers which, hilariously, were still delivered to the front door every morning. This was how they learned about the Cotswold family tragedy, the traffic accidents, and the countrywide courier slowdown. But the London papers made hardly any mention of the war on China or the strike, save for a brief announcement about some ‘internal disturbances’ at the ‘prestigious Royal Institute of Translation’. ‘We’re being silenced,’ Victoire said grimly. ‘They’re doing this on purpose.’ But how long did Parliament think it could keep things quiet? On the fifth morning, they were woken by a horribly discordant noise. It took some rooting through the ledgers to find out what was going on. Great Tom of Christ Church, the loudest bell in Oxford, had always sung a slightly
imperfect B-flat note. But whatever silver-work regulated its sound had stopped working, and Great Tom now blared a devastating, eerie groan. By that afternoon, it was joined by the bells at St Martin’s, St Mary’s, and Osney Abbey, an ongoing, miserable, groaning chorus.
Babel’s wards blocked out the sound somewhat, though by that evening they’d all learned to live with a constant, dreadful murmur seeping through the walls. They wore cotton in their ears to sleep.
The bells were a funeral dirge to an illusion. The city of dreaming spires was no longer. Oxford’s degradation was visible – one could see it crumbling by the hour like a rotting gingerbread house. What became clear was how deeply Oxford relied on silver, how without the constant labour of its translation corps, of the talent it attracted from abroad, it immediately fell apart. It revealed more than the power of translation. It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.
And still this was only the beginning. The maintenance ledgers were endless, and there were hundreds of resonance rods yet to be uprooted. ‘How far are they going to let this go?’ was the question they kept asking inside the tower. For they were all amazed, and somewhat horrified, that the city had still not acknowledged the real reason behind this strike; that Parliament had still not taken action.
Privately, Robin did not want this to end. He would never confess it to the others, but deep down, where the ghosts of Griffin and Ramy resided, he did not want a speedy resolution, a nominal settlement that only papered over decades of exploitation.
He wanted to see how far he could take this. He wanted to see Oxford broken down to its foundations, wanted its fat, golden opulence to slough away; for its pale, elegant bricks to crumble to pieces; for its turrets to smash against cobblestones; for its bookshelves to collapse like dominoes. He wanted the whole place dismantled so thoroughly that it would be as if it had never been built. All those buildings assembled by slaves, paid for by slaves, and stuffed with artifacts stolen from conquered lands, those buildings which had no right to exist, whose ongoing existence demanded continuous extraction and violence – destroyed, undone.
On the sixth day, they got the city’s attention at last. A crowd assembled at the base of the tower around midmorning, shouting for the scholars to come out. ‘Oh, look,’ Victoire said sarcastically. ‘It’s a militia.’ They gathered round a fourth-floor window and peered down below.
Many of the crowd were Oxford students – black-robed young men marching in defence of their town; scowling, chests puffed out. Robin recognized Vincy Woolcombe by his shock of red hair, and then Elton Pendennis, waving a torch above his head, shouting at the men behind him as if leading troops onto a battlefield. But there were women too, and children, and barkeeps and shopkeepers and farmers: a rare alliance of town and gown. ‘Probably we should go and talk to them,’ said Robin. ‘Else they’ll be
out there all day.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’ asked Meghana.
Robin scoffed. ‘Are you?’ ‘There’s quite a lot of them. You don’t know what they’ll do.’ ‘They’re students,’ said Robin. ‘They don’t know what they want to do.’ Indeed, it seemed that the agitators had not thought through how they would actually storm the tower. They were not even shouting in unison. Most just milled around the green, confused, glancing around as if waiting for someone else to give orders. This was not the angry mob of unemployed workers that had threatened Babel’s scholars over the past year; these were schoolboys and townspeople for whom violence was a wholly unfamiliar means of getting what they wanted. ‘You’re just going to walk out there?’ Ibrahim asked. ‘Why not?’ Robin asked. ‘May as well shout back.’ ‘Good Lord,’ Professor Chakravarti said suddenly, voice tight. ‘They’re trying to set this place ablaze.’ They turned back to the window. Now that the mob was drawing closer, Robin could see they had brought wagons piled high with kindling. They had torches. They had oil.
Were they going to burn them alive? Stupid, that would be so stupid – surely they understood the whole point was that Babel could not be lost, for Babel and the knowledge contained within it was precisely what they were fighting to reacquire. But perhaps rationality had fled. Perhaps there was
only the mob, fuelled by the sheer fury that something they thought was theirs had been taken from them.
Some students started to pile kindling at the foot of the tower. Robin felt his first stab of worry. This was no idle threat; they really meant to set the place alight.
He shoved the window open and stuck his head outside. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘You burn us, and you’ll never get your city in working order.’ Someone hurled a glass bottle at his face. He was too high up, and the bottle spiralled down before it came close, but still Professor Chakravarti yanked Robin backwards and slammed the window shut. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘No sense reasoning with madmen, I think.’ ‘Then what are we going to do?’ Ibrahim demanded. ‘They’re going to burn us alive!’ ‘The tower’s made of stone,’ Yusuf said dismissively. ‘We’ll be fine.’ ‘But the smoke—’ ‘We’ve got something,’ Professor Chakravarti said abruptly, as if only just remembering. ‘Upstairs, under the Burma files—’ ‘Anand!’ Professor Craft exclaimed. ‘They are civilians.’ ‘It’s self-defence,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Justified, I think.’ Professor Craft peered back out at the crowd. Her mouth pressed in a thin line. ‘Oh, very well.’ Without further explanation, the two of them made for the staircase. The rest glanced around at each other for a moment, at a loss for what to do.
Robin reached to open the window with one hand, fumbling around his inner front pocket with the other. Victoire grasped his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Griffin’s bar,’ he murmured. ‘You know, the one—’ ‘Are you mad?’ ‘They’re trying to burn us alive, let’s not debate the morals—’ ‘That could set all the oil alight.’ Her grip tightened, so much that it hurt. ‘That’ll kill half a dozen people. Calm down, will you?’ Robin put the bar back into his pocket, took a deep breath, and wondered at the hammering in his veins. He wanted a fight. He wanted to jump down there and bloody their faces with his fists. Wanted them to know exactly what he was, which was their worst nightmare – uncivilized, brutal, violent.
But it was over before it started. Like Professor Playfair, Pendennis and his sort were not soldiers. They liked to threaten and bluster. They liked to pretend the world obeyed their every whim. But at the end of the day, they were not meant for material struggle. They hadn’t the faintest clue how much effort it might take to bring down a tower, and Babel was the most fortified tower on earth.
Pendennis lowered his torch and set light to the kindling. The crowd cheered as the flames licked up the walls. But the fire failed to take. The flames jumped hungrily, reaching with orange tendrils as if seeking a foothold, but pointlessly fell back again. Several students ran up to the tower walls in some badly thought-out attempt to scale them, but they scarcely touched the bricks before some unseen force hurled them back against the green.
Professor Chakravarti came panting down the stairs, bearing a silver bar * that read .‘Sanskrit,’ he explained. ‘It’ll split them.’ He leaned out of the window, observed the fracas for a moment, and then hurled the bar at the centre of the mob. In seconds, the crowd began to dispel.
Robin couldn’t quite tell what was going on, but there seemed to be an argument on the ground, and the agitators wore looks of alternating irritation and confusion as they milled around like ducks circling each other on a pond.
Then, one by one, they drifted away from the tower; to home, to dinner, to waiting wives and husbands and children.
A small number of students lingered on for a little while. Elton Pendennis was still pontificating on the green, waving his torch above his head, yelling curses that they could not hear through the wards. But the tower, clearly, was never going to catch fire. The kindling burned pointlessly against the stone, and then spluttered out. The protestors’ voices grew hoarse with shouting; their cries faltered, and then finally died out completely. By sunset, the last of the rabble had straggled home.
The translators did not have supper until nearly midnight; unseasoned gruel, peach preserves, and two tea biscuits each. After much begging, Professor Craft relented and permitted them to bring up several bottles of red wine from the cellar. ‘Well,’ she said, pouring out generous glasses with a shaky hand. ‘Wasn’t that exciting.’
The next morning, the translators commenced the fortification of Babel.
They’d never been in any real danger the day before; even Juliana, who’d quietly cried herself to sleep, now laughed at the memory. But that prenatal riot was only the beginning. Oxford would continue to crumble, and the city would only hate them more. They had to prepare for next time.
They threw themselves into the work. Suddenly the tower felt just as it did during exam season. They sat in rows on the eighth floor, heads hunched over their texts, and the only sounds in the room were pages flipping and the occasional exclamation when someone stumbled upon a promising nugget of etymology. This felt good. Here at last was something to do, something that kept them from dawdling nervously as they awaited news from the outside.
Robin rooted through stacks of notes he’d found in Professor Lovell’s office, which contained many potential match-pairs prepared for the China campaign. One excited him very much: the Chinese character (li) could mean to sharpen one’s weapon, though it also carried connotations of profit and advantage, and its logogram represented grain being cut with a knife.
Knives sharpened with the -sharp match-pair had frightfully thin blades, and unerringly found their targets. ‘How is that useful?’ asked Victoire when he showed her. ‘It helps in a fight,’ said Robin. ‘Isn’t that the point?’ ‘Do you think you’re going to get in a knife fight with someone?’ He shrugged, annoyed and now a little embarrassed. ‘It could come down to that.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You want it to, don’t you?’ ‘Of course not, I don’t even – of course not. But if they get in, if it becomes strictly necessary—’ ‘We’re trying to defend the tower,’ she told him gently. ‘We’re just trying to keep ourselves safe. Not leave a field of blood in our wake.’ They began living like defenders under siege. They consulted classical texts – military histories, field manuals, strategic treatises – for ideas on how to run the tower. They instituted strict mealtimes and rations; no nibbling of the biscuits at midnight, as Ibrahim and Juliana had been caught doing. They hauled the rest of the old astronomy telescopes out onto the rooftop so they could keep watch over the deteriorating city. They set up a series of rotating two-hour surveillance shifts from the seventh- and eighth-floor windows so that when the next riots began, they’d see them coming from far away.
A day passed like this, and then another. It finally sank in that they’d passed the point of no return, that this was no temporary divergence; there would be no resumption of normal life. They emerged from here the victors, the harbingers of an unrecognizable Britain, or they left this tower dead.
‘They’re striking in London.’ Victoire shook his shoulders. ‘Robin, wake up.’ He bolted upright. The clock read ten past midnight; he’d just fallen asleep, preparing for a graveyard watch. ‘What? Who?’ ‘Everyone.’ Victoire sounded dazed, as if she couldn’t believe it herself. ‘Anthony’s pamphlets must have worked – I mean, the ones addressing the Radicals, the ones about labour, because look—’ She waved a telegram at him. ‘Even the telegraph office. They say there’ve been crowds around Parliament all day, demanding that they withdraw the war proposal—’ ‘Who’s everyone?’ ‘All the strikers from a few years ago – the tailors, the shoemakers, the weavers. They’re all striking again. And there’s more – there are dock workers, factory employees, gasworks stokers – I mean, really, everyone.
Look.’ She shook the telegram. ‘Look. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow.’ Robin squinted at the missive in the dim light, trying to comprehend what this meant.
A hundred miles away, white British factory workers were crowding Westminster Hall to protest a war in a country they’d never stepped foot in.
Was Anthony right? Had they forged the most unlikely of alliances?
Theirs was not the first of the antisilver revolts of that decade, only the most dramatic. The Rebecca Riots in Wales, the Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham, and the Chartist uprisings in Sheffield and Bradford just earlier that year had all tried and failed to halt the silver industrial revolution. The papers had made them out to be isolated outbursts of discontent. But it was clear now that they were all connected, all caught in the same web of coercion and exploitation. What was happening to the Lancashire spinners had happened to Indian weavers first. Sweating, exhausted textile workers in silver-gilded British factories spun cotton picked by slaves in America. Everywhere the silver industrial revolution had wrought poverty, inequality, and suffering, while the only ones who benefited were those in power at the heart of the Empire. And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take
only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear.
Until it did.
And if the oppressed came together, if they rallied around a common cause – here, now, was one of the impossible pivot points Griffin had spoken of so often. Here was their chance to push history off its course.
The first ceasefire offer came in from London an hour later: RESUME BABEL SERVICES. FULL AMNESTY EVEN FOR SWIFT AND DESGRAVES STOP.
OTHERWISE PRISON STOP. ‘Those are very bad terms,’ said Yusuf. ‘They’re absurd terms,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘How ought we respond?’ ‘I think we don’t,’ said Victoire. ‘I think we let them sweat, that we just keep pushing them to the edge.’ ‘But that’s dangerous,’ said Professor Craft. ‘They’ve opened up space for a dialogue, haven’t they? We can’t know how long it’ll stay open.
Suppose we ignore them and it closes—’ ‘There’s something else,’ Robin said sharply.
They watched the telegraph machine tap away in fearful, silent apprehension as Victoire took it down. ‘ARMY ON ITS WAY STOP,’ she read.
‘STAND DOWN STOP.’ ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Juliana. ‘But what good does that do them?’ Robin asked. ‘They can’t get through the wards—’ ‘We have to assume they can,’ Professor Chakravarti said grimly. ‘At least, that they will. We have to assume Jerome’s helping them.’ This set off a round of frightened babbling. ‘We’ve got to talk to them,’ said Professor Craft. ‘We’ll lose the window of negotiation—’ Said Ibrahim, ‘Suppose they put us all in prison, though—’ ‘Not if we surrender—’ Juliana began.
And Victoire, firm, vehement: ‘We can’t surrender. We’ll have gained nothing—’ ‘Hold on.’ Robin raised his voice over the din. ‘No – this threat, the Army – it all means it’s working, don’t you see? It means they’re scared. On the first day they still thought they could order us around. But they’ve felt the
consequences now. They’re terrified. Which means if we can just hold on for a bit, if we can just keep this up, we’ll win.’
