Page 150 of Babel

Chapter Twenty-Five

And I alone am left of all that lived,

Pent in this narrow, horrible conviction.

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES, Death’s Jest-Book

Robin did not remember how they escaped unnoticed from Oxford Castle. His mind had fled with Griffin’s death; he could not make decisions; he could hardly register where he was. The most he could do was to put one foot in front of the other, blindly following Victoire wherever she led them: into forests, through bushes and brambles, down a riverbank where they waited, huddled together in the mud, as dogs raced past, barking; then up onto a winding back road into the centre of town. Only when they were back among familiar surroundings, nearly in the shadows of Babel and the Radcliffe Library, did he find the self-possession to take stock of where they were going.

‘Isn’t this a bit close?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t we try the canal...?’

‘Not the canal,’ whispered Victoire. ‘It’ll take us right to the police station.’

‘But why aren’t we heading to the Cotswolds?’ He didn’t know why his mind had seized upon the Cotswold Hills, northwest of Oxford, filled with rolling empty plains and forests. They just seemed like the natural place to flee to. Perhaps he’d read it in a penny dreadful once, and had assumed the Cotswolds were a place for fugitives ever since. Certainly they seemed better than the heart of Oxford.

‘They’ll be looking for us in the Cotswolds,’ said Victoire. ‘They’ll be expecting us to run, they’ll have dogs combing the woods. But there’s a safe house near the city centre—’

‘No, we can’t – I gave that one up; Lovell knew, and so Playfair must too—’

‘There’s another. Anthony showed me – right near the Radcliffe Library, there’s a tunnel entrance at the back of Vaults. Just follow me.’

Robin could hear dogs barking in the distance as they approached the Radcliffe quadrangle. The police must have launched a city-wide manhunt; surely there were men and dogs trawling every street for them. Yet suddenly, absurdly, he felt no urgency to flee. They had Griffin’s wúxíng bar in hand; they could disappear at any moment.

And Oxford at night was still so serene, still seemed like a place where they were safe, where arrest was impossible. It still looked like a city carved out of the past; of ancient spires, pinnacles, and turrets; of soft moonlight on old stones and worn, cobbled roads. Its buildings were still so reassuringly heavy, solid, ancient and eternal. The lights that shone through arched windows still promised warmth, old books, and hot tea within; still suggested an idyllic scholar’s life, where ideas were abstract entertainments that could be bandied about without consequences.

But the dream was shattered. That dream had always been founded on a lie. None of them had ever stood a chance of truly belonging here, for Oxford wanted only one kind of scholar, the kind born and bred to cycle through posts of power it had created for itself. Everyone else it chewed up and discarded. These towering edifices were built with coin from the sale of slaves, and the silver that kept them running came blood-stained from the mines of Potosí. It was smelted in choking forges where native labourers were paid a pittance, before making its way on ships across the Atlantic to where it was shaped by translators ripped from their countries, stolen to this faraway land and never truly allowed to go home.

He’d been so foolish ever to think he could build a life here. There was no straddling the line; he knew that now. No stepping back and forth between two worlds, no seeing and not seeing, no holding a hand over one eye or the other like a child playing a game. You were either a part of this institution, one of the bricks that held it up, or you weren’t.

Victoire’s fingers wound around his.

‘There’s no redeeming it, is there?’ he asked.

She squeezed his hand. ‘No.’

Their mistake had been so obvious. They had assumed that Oxford might not betray them. Their dependence on Babel was ingrained, unconscious. On some level, they had still believed that the university, and their status as its scholars, might protect them. They had assumed, in spite of every indication otherwise, that those with the most to gain from the Empire’s continued expansion might find it within themselves to do the right thing.

Pamphlets. They’d thought they could win this with pamphlets.

He almost laughed at the absurdity. Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

‘I think Griffin was right,’ Robin murmured. ‘It had to be the tower all along. We have to take the tower.’

‘Hm.’ Victoire’s lip curled up; her fingers tightened around his. ‘How do you want to do that?’

‘He said it would be easy. He said they were scholars, not soldiers. He said all you’d need was a gun. Perhaps a knife.’

She laughed bitterly. ‘I believe it.’

It was only an idea, a wish more than anything, but it was a beginning. And it took root and grew inside them, unfurled until it became less a ludicrous fantasy and more a question of logistics, of how and when.

Across the town students were fast asleep. Next to them, tomes by Plato and Locke and Montesquieu waited to be read, discussed, gesticulated about; theoretical rights like freedom and liberty would be debated between those who already enjoyed them, stale concepts that, upon their readers’ graduation ceremonies, would promptly be forgotten. That life, and all of its preoccupations, seemed insane to him now; he could not believe there was ever a time when his greatest concerns were what colour neckties to order from Randall’s, or what insults to shout at houseboats hogging the river during rowing practice. It was all such frippery, fluff, trivial distractions built over a foundation of ongoing, unimaginable cruelty.

Robin gazed at the curve of Babel against the moonlight, at the faint silver glow cast off by its many reinforcements. He had a sudden, very clear vision of the tower in ruins. He wanted it to shatter. He wanted it to, for once, feel the pain that had made possible its rarefied existence. ‘I want it to crumble.’

Victoire’s throat pulsed, and he knew she was thinking of Anthony, of gunshots, of the wreckage of the Old Library. ‘I want it to burn.’