‘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 ? (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 ?-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.