Babel, page 59
‘The Oxford Martyrs were tried for heresy and burned at the stake,’ said Robin.
‘Ah,’ said Ibrahim, eyes twinkling. ‘But Oxford’s an Anglican university now, isn’t it?’
Robin wondered in the days that followed if what they’d felt that night was a shared sense of mortality, akin to how soldiers felt sitting in trenches at war. For it was war, what was breaking out on those streets. Westminster Bridge had not fallen, not yet, but the accidents continued and the shortages grew worse. London’s patience was strained. The public demanded retribution, demanded action, in some form or another. And since Parliament would not vote no on the China invasion, they simply increased their pressure on the Army.
It appeared the guardsmen had orders to leave the tower itself alone, but were permitted to aim at individual scholars when they got the chance. Robin stopped venturing outside when a rendezvous with Abel Goodfellow was interrupted by a spate of rifle fire. Once, a window shattered next to Victoire’s head when she was searching the stacks for a book. They all dropped to the floor and crawled on hands and knees to the basement, where they were protected by walls on all sides. Later they found a bullet lodged in the shelf just behind where she’d been standing.
‘How is this possible?’ demanded Professor Craft. ‘Nothing penetrates these windows. Nothing gets through these walls.’
Curious, Robin examined the bullet: thick, warped, and unnaturally cold to the touch. He held it up to the light and saw a thin band of silver lining the base of the casing. ‘I suppose Professor Playfair thought of something.’
That raised the stakes. Babel was not impenetrable. This was not a strike any longer, but a siege. If the soldiers broke through the barricades, if soldiers wielding Professor Playfair’s inventions reached the front door, their strike was effectively over. Professor Craft and Professor Chakravarti had replaced Professor Playfair’s wards on their first night in the tower, but even they admitted they were not as good at this as Professor Playfair had been; they were not sure how well their own defences would hold up.
‘Let’s stay away from windows from now on,’ Victoire suggested.
For now the barricades held, though outside, the skirmishing had turned vicious. Initially Abel Goodfellow’s strikers had fought a purely defensive war from behind the barricades. They reinforced their structures, they ran supply lines, but they did not provoke the guardsmen. Now the streets had turned bloody. Soldiers fired regularly now on the barricaders, and the barricaders struck back in turn. They made incendiary devices with cloth, oil, and bottles and hurled them at the Army camps. They climbed the rooftops of the Radcliffe Library and the Bodleian, from which they threw paving stones and poured boiling water onto the troops below.
It shouldn’t have been so evenly matched, civilians against guardsmen. In theory, they shouldn’t have lasted a week. But many of Abel’s men were veterans, men discharged from an army falling into disrepair after the defeat of Napoleon. They knew where to find firearms. They knew what to do with them.
The translators helped. Victoire, who’d been reading furiously through French dissident literature, composed the match-pair élan-energy, the latter of which bore connotations of a particular French revolutionary zeal, and which could be traced back to the Latin lancea, meaning ‘lance’. Carried through was an association with throwing and momentum, and it was this latent distortion into the English energy that helped the barricaders’ projectiles fly further, hit truer, and make more of an impact than bricks and cobblestones ought to have been able to do.
They’d come up with a few wilder ideas which bore no fruit. The word seduce came from the Latin seducere, meaning ‘to lead astray’, from which the late-fifteenth-century definition ‘to persuade one to abandon their allegiance’ came about. This seemed promising, but they could not think of a way to manifest it without sending the girls into the front lines, which no one was willing to suggest, or dressing up Abel’s men in women’s clothes, which seemed unlikely to work. There was also the German word Nachtmahr, a now rarely used word for ‘nightmare’, which also referred to a malicious entity that sat upon the sleeper’s chest. Some experimentation proved this match-pair made bad dreams worse when one had them, but seemed unable to induce them in the first place.
One morning, Abel showed up in the lobby with several long, slender cloth-wrapped parcels. ‘Can any of you shoot?’ he asked.
Robin imagined aiming one of those rifles at a living body and pulling the trigger. He wasn’t sure that he could do it. ‘Not well.’
‘Not with those,’ said Victoire.
‘Then let some of my men in there,’ said Abel. ‘You’ve got the best vantage point in the city. Pity if you don’t use it.’
Day after day, the barricades held. Robin found it amazing that they didn’t shatter under the weight of the near constant cannon fire, but Abel was confident they could hold out indefinitely as long as they kept scrounging up new materials to bolster the damaged sections.
‘It’s because we’ve built them in V-shaped structures,’ he explained. ‘The cannonballs hit the protrusion, which only packs the materials in more tightly.’
Robin was sceptical. ‘They can’t hold forever, though.’
‘No, perhaps not.’
‘And what happens when they come pouring through?’ Robin asked. ‘Will you flee? Or will you stay and fight?’
Abel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘At the French barricades, revolutionaries would march up to the soldiers with their shirts open and shout at them to shoot, if they dared.’
‘Did they?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes they shot them dead on sight. But other times – well, think about it. You’re looking someone in the eyes. They’re around your age, or younger. From the same city. Possibly the same neighbourhood. Possibly you know them, or you see in their face someone you could know. Would you pull the trigger?’
‘I suppose not,’ Robin admitted, though a small voice in his mind whispered, Letty did.
‘Every soldier’s conscience has a limit,’ said Abel. ‘I suppose they’ll try to arrest us. But firing on townspeople? Carrying out a massacre? I’m not so sure. But we’ll force that split. We’ll see what happens.’
It will all be over soon. They tried to reassure themselves at night when they looked out over the city, saw the torchlight and cannon fire burning bright. They needed only to hold out until Saturday. Parliament could not sustain this any longer than they could. They could not let Westminster Bridge fall.
Then, always, the strange, tentative imagining of what a ceasefire might look like. Should they write up a contract with terms of amnesty? Yusuf took charge of this, drafting a treaty that saved them from the gallows. When the tower resumed normal functioning, would they be a part of it? What did scholarship look like in the age after empire, when they knew Britain’s silver stores would dwindle into nothing? They had never considered these questions before, but now, when the outcome of this strike stood on a razor’s edge, their only comfort was in prognosticating the future in such detail that it seemed possible.
But Robin couldn’t bring himself to try. He couldn’t bear those conversations; he excused himself whenever they occurred.
There was no future without Ramy, without Griffin, without Anthony and Cathy and Ilse and Vimal. As far as he was concerned, time had stopped when Letty’s bullet had left the chamber. All there was now was the fallout. What happened after was for someone else to struggle through. Robin only wanted it all to end.
Victoire found him on the rooftop, hugging his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth to the sound of gunfire. She sat down beside him. ‘Bored with legal terminology?’
‘It feels like a game,’ he said. ‘It feels ludicrous – and I know this, all of this, was ludicrous to begin with, but that – talking about after – just feels like an exercise in fantasy.’
‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’
‘They were better than us.’
‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’
Chapter Thirty
Westminster Bridge fell.*
Chapter Thirty-One
Westminster Bridge fell, and Oxford broke out in open warfare.
They were crowded around the telegraph machine, waiting anxiously for an update, when one of the gunmen rushed in from upstairs and caught his breath before announcing, ‘They’ve killed a girl.’
They followed him to the rooftop. With his naked eye Robin could see a commotion up north in Jericho, a frenzied movement of the crowd, but it took a moment of fumbling with a telescope before he honed in on what the gunmen were pointing at.
Soldiers and labourers at the Jericho barricade had just exchanged fire, the gunman told them. Usually this led to nothing – warning shots echoed throughout the city at all times, and the sides usually took turns firing before retreating back down behind the barricades. Symbolic; it was all supposed to be symbolic. But this time a body had toppled.
The telescope lens revealed a startling amount of detail. The victim was young, she was white, she was fair-haired and pretty, and the blood blossoming from her stomach stained the ground a vivid, unmistakable scarlet. Against the slate-grey cobblestones, it looked like a flag.
She wasn’t wearing trousers. The women who’d joined the barricades usually wore trousers. She had on a shawl and a flowing skirt, and an upturned basket still hung from her left arm. She could have been on her way to buy groceries. She could have been on her way home to a husband, to parents, to children.
Robin straightened up. ‘Was it—’
‘It wasn’t us,’ said the other gunman. ‘Look at the angle. She’s turned away from the barricades. It wasn’t one of ours, I tell you.’
Shouts from below. Shots whistled above their heads. Startled, they hurried back down the stairs into the safety of the tower.
They congregated in the basement, huddled nervously, eyes darting around like frightened children who had just done something very naughty. This was the first civilian casualty of the barricades, and it was momentous. The line had been breached.
‘It’s over,’ said Professor Craft. ‘This is open warfare on English soil. This all needs to end.’
A debate broke open then.
‘But it wasn’t our fault,’ said Ibrahim.
‘They don’t care if it’s our fault,’ said Yusuf. ‘We started it—’
‘Then do we surrender?’ demanded Meghana. ‘After all this? We just stop?’
‘We don’t stop,’ said Robin. The strength of his voice stunned him. It came from someplace beyond him. It sounded older; it sounded like Griffin’s. And it must have resonated, for the voices quieted, and all faces turned towards him, scared, expectant, hopeful. ‘This is when the tides turn. This was the most foolish thing they could have done.’ Blood thundered in his ears. ‘Before, the whole city was against us, don’t you see? But now the Army’s messed up. They’ve shot one of the townsfolk. There’s no coming back from that. Do you think Oxford’s going to support the Army now?’
‘If you’re right,’ Professor Craft said slowly, ‘then things are about to get much worse.’
‘Good,’ said Robin. ‘As long as the barricades hold.’
Victoire was watching him with narrowed eyes, and he knew what she suspected – that this did not weigh on his conscience at all, that he wasn’t nearly as distressed as the others.
Well, why not admit it? He was not ashamed. He was right. This girl, whoever she was, was a symbol; she proved that empire had no restraints, that empire would do anything to protect itself. Go on, he thought; do it again; kill more of them; turn the streets red with the blood of your own. Show them who you are. Show them their whiteness won’t save them. Here, at last, was an unforgivable offence with a clear perpetrator. The Army had killed this girl. And if Oxford wanted vengeance, there was only one way to get it.
That night Oxford’s streets exploded into proper violence. The fighting started at the far end of the city, at Jericho where the first blood was shed, and gradually spread as more and more points of conflict developed. The cannon fire was constant. The whole city was awake with shouts and rioting, and Robin saw on those streets more people than he had ever imagined lived in Oxford.
The scholars clustered by the windows, peeking out in between spates of sniper fire.
‘This is insane,’ Professor Craft kept whispering. ‘Absolutely insane.’
Insane was not enough to cover it, Robin thought. English was insufficient to describe all this. His mind wandered to old Chinese texts, the idioms they employed about dynastic collapse and change. 天翻地覆; tiānfāndìfù. The heavens fell, and the earth collapsed in on itself. The world turned upside down. Britain was spilling its own blood, Britain was gouging out its own flesh, and nothing after this could go back to the way it had been before.
At midnight Abel summoned Robin to the lobby.
‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘We’re nearing the end of the road.’
‘What do you mean?’ Robin asked. ‘This is good for us – they’ve provoked the entire city, haven’t they?’
‘It won’t last,’ said Abel. ‘They’re angry now, but they’re not soldiers. They’ve got no endurance. I’ve seen this before. By the early hours of the night, they’ll start straggling home. And I’ve just had word from the Army that at dawn, they’ll start firing on whoever’s still out there.’
‘But what about the barricades?’ Robin asked, desperate. ‘They’re still up—’
‘We’re down to the last circle of barriers. High Street is all we’ve got. There’s no pretence of civility any longer. They’ll break through; it’s not a question of if, but when. And the fact is, we’re a civilian uprising and they’re a trained, armed battalion with reinforcements to spare. If history is anything to go by, if this really does become a battle, then we’re going to get crushed. We aren’t keen on a repeat of Peterloo.’* Abel sighed. ‘The illusion of restraint could only ever last so long. I hope we’ve bought you time.’
‘I suppose they were happy to fire on you after all,’ said Robin.
Abel cast him a rueful look. ‘I suppose it doesn’t feel good to be right.’
‘Well then.’ Robin felt a roil of frustration but forced it down; it wasn’t fair to blame Abel for these developments, nor was it fair to ask him to stay any longer, when all he would face was near certain death or arrest. ‘Thank you, I suppose. Thank you for everything.’
‘Hold on,’ said Abel. ‘I didn’t come just to announce we were abandoning you.’
Robin shrugged. He tried not to sound resentful. ‘It’ll be over very quickly without those barricades.’
‘I’m telling you this is your chance to get out. We’ll start ferrying people away before the shooting gets properly vicious. A few of us will stay to defend the barricades, and that’ll distract them long enough to get the rest out to the Cotswolds, at least.’
‘No,’ Robin said. ‘No, thank you, but we can’t. We’re staying in the tower.’
Abel arched an eyebrow. ‘All of you?’
What he meant: Can you make that decision? Can you tell me everyone in there wants to die? And he was right to ask, because no, Robin could not speak for all seven remaining scholars; in fact, he realized, he had no idea what they would choose to do next.
‘I’ll ask,’ he said, chastened. ‘How long—’
‘Within the hour,’ said Abel. ‘Sooner, if you can. Would rather not tarry.’
Robin steeled himself a moment before going back upstairs. He didn’t know how to tell them this was the end. His face kept threatening to crumple, to reveal the scared boy hiding behind the ghost of his older brother. He had roped all these people into this last stand; he could not bear the sight of their faces when he told them it was over.
Everyone was on the fourth floor, clustered at the east window. He joined them. Outside, soldiers were marching forth on the lawn, advancing at an oddly hesitant pace.
‘What are they doing?’ wondered Professor Craft. ‘Is this a charge?’
‘You’d think they’d charge with more of them,’ said Victoire.
She had a point. More than a dozen troops had halted on High Street, but only five soldiers proceeded the rest of the way towards the tower. As they watched, the soldiers parted, and a solitary figure stepped through their ranks up to the final remaining barricade.
Victoire drew in a sharp breath.
It was Letty. She waved a white flag.
Chapter Thirty-Two
She sate upon her Dobie,
To watch the Evening Star,
And all the Punkahs as they passed
Cried, ‘My! How fair you are!’
EDWARD LEAR, ‘The Cummerbund’
They sent everyone else upstairs before they opened the door. Letty was not here to negotiate with the crowd; they would not have sent an undergraduate to do so. This was personal; Letty was here for a reckoning.
‘Let her through,’ Robin told Abel.
‘Pardon?’
‘She’s here to talk. Tell them to let her through.’
Abel spoke a word to his man, who ran across the green to inform the barricaders. Two men climbed on top of the barricade and bent down. A moment later Letty was lifted over the top, then lowered none-too-gently down onto the other side.
She made her way across the green, shoulders hunched, flag trailing behind her on the pavement. She did not raise her eyes until she met them at the threshold.
‘Hello, Letty,’ said Victoire.
‘Hello,’ Letty murmured. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’
She looked miserable. She had clearly not been sleeping; her clothes were dirty and rumpled, her cheeks hollow, and her eyes red and puffy from crying. The way she hunched her shoulders around her, as if flinching from a blow, made her look very small. And despite himself, despite everything, all Robin wanted then was to give her a hug.
