Babel, page 55
‘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 artefacts 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’re 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 भिन्त्ते.* ‘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 利 (lì) 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 利-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 to 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.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
What say you, then,
To times, when half the city shall break out
Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude
The next morning they awoke to find that a set of barricades had mysteriously sprung up around the tower overnight. Great, tottering obstructions blocked up every major street leading towards Babel – High Street, Broad Street, Cornmarket. Was this the Army’s work? They wondered. But it all seemed too slapdash, too haphazard to be an Army operation. The barricades were made of everyday materials – upturned carts, sand-filled barrels, fallen streetlamps, iron grillwork ripped away from the fences round Oxford’s parks, and the stone rubble that had been gathering at every street corner as evidence of the city’s slow deterioration. And what benefit did the Army obtain by fencing in their own streets?
