Page 159 of Babel

Oxford looked so tiny beneath him. A doll’s house, a twee approximation of the real world for boys who would never have to truly engage with it. He wondered if this was how men like Jardine and Matheson saw the world – minuscule, manipulable. If people and places moved around the lines they drew. If cities shattered when they stomped.

Below, the stone steps at the front of the tower were alight with flames. The blood vials of all but the eight scholars who’d remained within the tower had been smashed against the bricks, doused with oil poured from unused lamps, and set aflame. This was not strictly necessary; all that mattered was that the vials were removed from the tower – but Robin and Victoire had insisted on ceremony. They had learned from Professor Playfair the importance of performance, and this macabre display was a statement, a warning. The castle was stormed, the magician thrown out.

‘Ready?’ Victoire placed a stack of papers on the ledge. Babel did not possess its own printing press, so they’d spent the morning laboriously copying out each of those hundred pamphlets. The declaration borrowed both from Anthony’s coalition-building rhetoric and Griffin’s philosophy of violence. Robin and Victoire had joined their voices – one an eloquent urge to link arms in a fight for justice, the other an uncompromising threat to those who opposed them – into a clear, succinct announcement of their intentions.

We, the students of the Royal Institute of Translation, demand Britain cease consideration of an unlawful war against China. Given this government’s determination to initiate hostilities and its brutal suppression of those working to expose its motives, we have no other option to make our voices heard than to cease all translation and silver-working services by the Institute, until such time as our demands are met. We henceforth declare our strike.

Such an interesting word, Robin thought, strike.* It brought to mind hammers against spikes, bodies throwing themselves against an immovable force. It contained in itself the paradox of the concept; that through nonaction, and nonviolence, one might prove the devastating consequences of refusing to accommodate those one relied upon.

Below them, Oxfordians were going about their merry way. No one glanced up; no one saw the two students leaning over the tallest point in the city. The exiled translators were nowhere in sight; if Playfair had sought the police, they had not yet chosen to act. The city remained serene, clueless as to what was coming.

Oxford, we ask you to stand with us. The strike will cause great hardships for the city in days to come. We ask you to direct your ire to the government that has made such a strike our only recourse. We ask you to stand on the side of justice and fairness.

From there the pamphlets articulated the clear dangers of an influx of silver to the British economy, not only for China and the colonies, but for the working class of England. Robin did not expect anyone to read that far. He did not expect the city to support their strike; to the contrary, once the silver-work began breaking down, he expected they would hate them.

But the tower was impenetrable, and their hate did not matter. All that mattered was that they understood the cause of their inconvenience.

‘How long do you think until they reach London?’ asked Victoire.

‘Hours,’ said Robin. ‘I think this reaches the first train headed from here to Paddington.’

They had chosen the unlikeliest of places for a revolution. Oxford was not the centre of activity, it was a refuge, decades behind the rest of England in every realm but the academic. The university was designed to be a bastion of antiquity, where scholars could fancy themselves in any of the past five centuries, where scandals and turmoil were so scarce that it made the University College newsletter if a red-breast began singing near the end of an exhaustingly long sermon at Christ Church.

But though Oxford was not the seat of power, it produced the occupants thereof. Its alumni ran the Empire. Someone, perhaps this moment, was rushing to Oxford Station with news of the occupation. Someone would recognize its significance, would see it was not a petty students’ game but a crisis of national importance. Someone would get this in front of the Cabinet and the House of Lords. Then Parliament would choose what happened next.

‘Go on.’ Robin nodded to Victoire. Her Classical pronunciation was better than his. ‘Let’s see them fly.’

‘Polemikós,’ she murmured, holding a bar over the stack. ‘Polemic. Discutere. Discuss.’

She pushed the stack off the ledge. The pamphlets took flight. The wind carried them soaring across the city; over spires and turrets down onto streets, yards, and gardens; flying down chimneys, darting through grates, slipping into open windows. They accosted everyone they came across, clinging to coats, flapping in faces, sticking persistently to satchels and briefcases. Most would bat them aside, irritated. But a few would pick them up, would read the strikers’ manifesto, would slowly register what this meant for Oxford, for London, and for the Empire. And then no one would be able to ignore them. Then the entire world would be forced to look.

‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.

Victoire had gone as still as a statue, eyes fixed on the pamphlets as if she could will herself to become a bird, to fly among them. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I – you know.’

‘It’s funny.’ She did not turn to meet his eye. ‘I’m waiting for it to hit, but it simply – it never does. Not like with you.’

‘It wasn’t the same.’ He tried to find words that would comfort, that would make it out to be anything other than it was. ‘It was self-defence. And he might still survive, it might – I mean, it won’t be—’

‘It was for Anthony,’ she said in a very hard voice. ‘And that’s the last I ever want to speak of it.’