Book III
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Chapter Thirteen
Mountains will be in labour, the birth will be a single laughable little mouse.
HORACE, Ars Poetica, trans. E.C. Wickham
Griffin made good on his word. He never left another note for Robin. At first, Robin was sure Griffin would merely take some time to sulk before pestering him again for smaller, more routine errands. But a week became a month, which became a term. He’d expected Griffin to be a bit more vindictive – to leave a recriminating farewell letter, at least. For the first few days after their falling-out, he flinched every time a stranger glanced his way on the street, convinced that the Hermes Society had decided it best to tie up this loose end.
But Griffin had cut him out entirely.
He tried not to let his conscience bother him. Hermes was not going anywhere. There would always be battles to fight. They would all be there waiting when Robin was ready to rejoin them, he was sure. And he could do nothing for Hermes if he did not remain firmly ensconced within Babel’s ecosystem. Griffin had said it himself – they needed people on the inside. Wasn’t that reason enough to stay right where he was?
Meanwhile, there were third-year exams. End-of-year exams were quite a matter of ceremony at Oxford. Up until the last years of the previous century, viva voce exams – oral questioning ordeals made public for crowds of spectators to witness – had been the norm, although by the early 1830s the regular BA degree required only five written examinations and one viva voce exam, on the grounds that oral responses were too difficult to assess objectively and were unnecessarily cruel besides. By 1836, spectators were no longer allowed at the vivas either, and the townspeople lost a great source of annual entertainment.
Instead, Robin’s cohort was told to expect a three-hour essay exam in each of their research languages; a three-hour essay exam in Etymology; a viva voce exam in Translation Theory, and a silver-working test. They could not stay on at Babel if they failed any of their language or theory exams, and if they failed the silver-working test, they could not, in the future, work on the eighth floor.*
The viva voce would be done in front of a panel of three professors led by Professor Playfair, who was a notoriously tough examiner, and who was rumoured to make at least two students dissolve into tears every year. ‘Balderdash,’ he would drawl slowly, ‘is a word which used to refer to the cursed concoction created by bartenders when they’d nearly run out of every drink at the end of the night. Ale, wine, cider, milk – they’d dump it all in and hope their patrons wouldn’t mind, since after all the goal was simply to get drunk. But this is Oxford University, not the Turf Tavern after midnight, and we are in need of something slightly more illuminating than getting sloshed. Would you like to try again?’
Time, which had felt infinite during their first and second years, now ran quickly down the hourglass. No longer could they put off their readings to have a lark on the river under the assumption there was always the opportunity later to catch up. Exams were in five weeks, then four, then three. When Trinity term drew to an end, the last day of class should have culminated in a golden afternoon, in desserts and elderflower cordial and punting on the Cherwell. But the moment the bells rang at four, they packed up their books and walked straight from Professor Craft’s classroom to one of the study rooms on the fifth floor, where they would wall themselves in, every day for the next thirteen days, to pore over dictionaries and translated passages and vocabulary lists until their temples throbbed.
Acting from generosity, or perhaps sadism, the Babel faculty made available a set of silver bars for examinees to use as study aids. These bars were engraved with a match-pair using the English word meticulous and its Latin forerunner metus, meaning ‘fear, dread’. The modern usage of meticulous had arisen just a few decades before in France, with the connotation of being fearful of making a mistake. The effect of the bars was to induce a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work.
Ramy hated and refused to use them. ‘It doesn’t tell you where you went wrong,’ he complained. ‘It just makes you want to vomit for no reason you can discern.’
‘Well, you could do with more caution,’ Letty grumbled, returning his marked-up composition. ‘You’ve made at least twelve errors on this page, and your sentences are far too long—’
‘They’re not too long; they’re Ciceronian.’
‘You can’t just excuse all bad writing on the grounds that it’s Ciceronian—’
Ramy waved a hand dismissively. ‘That’s fine, Letty, I cranked that one out in ten minutes.’
‘But it’s not about speed. It’s about precision—’
‘The more I get done, the larger range I’ve acquired for the possible paper questions,’ said Ramy. ‘And that’s what we’ve really got to prepare for. I don’t want to go blank when the paper’s in front of me.’
This was a valid worry. Stress had the unique ability to wipe students’ minds clear of things they had been studying for years. During the fourth-year exams last year, one examinee was rumoured to have become so paranoid that he declared not only that he could not finish the exam but that he was lying about being fluent in French at all. (He was in fact a native speaker.) They all thought they were immune to this particular folly until one day, a week before exams, Letty suddenly broke down crying and declared she knew not a word of German, not a single word, that she was a fraud and her entire career at Babel had been based on pretence. None of them understood this rant until much later, for she had indeed delivered it in German.
Failure of memory was only the first symptom to come. Never had Robin’s anxiety over his marks made him so physically ill. First came a persistent, throbbing headache, and then the constant urge to throw up every time he stood or moved. Waves of tremors kept coming over him with no warning; often his hand shook so hard that he had difficulty gripping his pen. Once, during a practice paper, he found his vision blacking out; he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember a single word, couldn’t even see. It took him nearly ten minutes to recover. He couldn’t make himself eat. He was somehow both exhausted all the time and unable to sleep from a surplus of nervous energy.
Then, like all good Oxford upperclassmen, he found himself losing his mind. His grip on reality, already tenuous from sustained isolation in a city of scholars, became even more fragmented. Hours of revision had interfered with his processing of signs and symbols, his belief in what was real and what was not. The abstract was factual and important; daily exigencies like porridge and eggs were suspect. Everyday dialogue became a chore; small talk was a horror, and he lost his grip on what basic salutations meant. When the porter asked him if he’d had a good one, he stood still and mute for a good thirty seconds, unable to process what was meant by ‘good’, or indeed, ‘one’.
‘Oh, same,’ Ramy said cheerfully when Robin brought this up. ‘It’s awful. I can’t have basic conversations anymore – I keep on wondering what the words really mean.’
‘I’m walking into walls,’ said Victoire. ‘The world keeps disappearing around me, and all I can perceive are vocabulary lists.’
‘It’s tea leaves for me,’ said Letty. ‘They keep looking like glyphs, and I really did find myself trying to gloss one the other day – I’d even started copying it out on paper and everything.’
It relieved Robin to hear he wasn’t the only one seeing things, because the visions worried him the most. He’d begun to hallucinate entire persons. Once when hunting through the bookshelves at Thornton’s for a poetry anthology on their Latin reading list, Robin glimpsed what he thought was a familiar profile by the door. He walked closer. His eyes had not betrayed him – Anthony Ribben was paying for a paper-wrapped parcel, hale and healthy as could be.
‘Anthony—’ Robin blurted.
Anthony glanced up. He saw Robin. His eyes widened. Robin started forward, confused yet elated, but Anthony hastily pushed several coins at the bookseller and darted out of the shop. By the time Robin made his way out onto Magdalene Street, Anthony had disappeared from sight. Robin stared around for several seconds, then returned to the bookshop, wondering if it was possible he’d mistaken a stranger for Anthony. But there were not many young Black men in Oxford. Which meant either he’d been lied to about Anthony’s death – that indeed, all of Babel’s faculty had done it as some elaborate hoax – or he’d imagined the whole thing. In his current state, he found the latter far more likely.
The exam they all dreaded most was the silver-working test. During the last week of Trinity term, they’d been informed they’d have to devise a unique match-pair and engrave it in front of a proctor. In their fourth year, once they had finished their apprenticeships, they would learn proper techniques of match-pair design, engraving, and experimentation for magnitude and duration of effect, as well as the intricacies of resonance links and spoken manifestation. But for now, armed with just the basic principles of how match-pairs worked, they had only to achieve any effect at all. It did not need to be perfect; indeed, first tries never were. But they had to do something. They had to prove they possessed the undefinable stuff, the inimitable instinct for meaning, that made a translator a silver-worker.