Page 164 of Babel

He wanted to see how far he could take this. He wanted to see Oxford broken down to its foundations, wanted its fat, golden opulence to slough away; for its pale, elegant bricks to crumble to pieces; for its turrets to smash against cobblestones; for its bookshelves to collapse like dominoes. He wanted the whole place dismantled so thoroughly that it would be as if it had never been built. All those buildings assembled by slaves, paid for by slaves, and stuffed with artefacts stolen from conquered lands, those buildings which had no right to exist, whose ongoing existence demanded continuous extraction and violence – destroyed, undone.

On the sixth day, they got the city’s attention at last. A crowd assembled at the base of the tower around midmorning, shouting for the scholars to come out.

‘Oh, look,’ Victoire said sarcastically. ‘It’s a militia.’

They gathered round a fourth-floor window and peered down below. Many of the crowd were Oxford students – black-robed young men marching in defence of their town; scowling, chests puffed out. Robin recognized Vincy Woolcombe by his shock of red hair, and then Elton Pendennis, waving a torch above his head, shouting at the men behind him as if leading troops onto a battlefield. But there were women too, and children, and barkeeps and shopkeepers and farmers: a rare alliance of town and gown.

‘Probably we should go and talk to them,’ said Robin. ‘Else they’ll be out there all day.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’ asked Meghana.

Robin scoffed. ‘Are you?’

‘There’s quite a lot of them. You don’t know what they’ll do.’

‘They’re students,’ said Robin. ‘They don’t know what they want to do.’

Indeed, it seemed that the agitators had not thought through how they would actually storm the tower. They were not even shouting in unison. Most just milled around the green, confused, glancing around as if waiting for someone else to give orders. This was not the angry mob of unemployed workers that had threatened Babel’s scholars over the past year; these were schoolboys and townspeople for whom violence was a wholly unfamiliar means of getting what they wanted.

‘You’re just going to walk out there?’ Ibrahim asked.

‘Why not?’ Robin asked. ‘May as well shout back.’

‘Good Lord,’ Professor Chakravarti said suddenly, voice tight. ‘They’re trying to set this place ablaze.’

They turned back to the window. Now that the mob was drawing closer, Robin could see they had brought wagons piled high with kindling. They had torches. They had oil.

Were they going to burn them alive? Stupid, that would be so stupid – surely they understood the whole point was that Babel could not be lost, for Babel and the knowledge contained within it was precisely what they were fighting to reacquire. But perhaps rationality had fled. Perhaps there was only the mob, fuelled by the sheer fury that something they thought was theirs had been taken from them.

Some students started to pile kindling at the foot of the tower. Robin felt his first stab of worry. This was no idle threat; they really meant to set the place alight.

He shoved the window open and stuck his head outside. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘You burn us, and you’ll never get your city in working order.’

Someone hurled a glass bottle at his face. He was too high up, and the bottle spiralled down before it came close, but still Professor Chakravarti yanked Robin backwards and slammed the window shut.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘No sense reasoning with madmen, I think.’

‘Then what are we going to do?’ Ibrahim demanded. ‘They’re going to burn us alive!’

‘The tower’s made of stone,’ Yusuf said dismissively. ‘We’ll be fine.’

‘But the smoke—’

‘We’ve got something,’ Professor Chakravarti said abruptly as if only just remembering. ‘Upstairs, under the Burma files—’

‘Anand!’ Professor Craft exclaimed. ‘They’re civilians.’

‘It’s self-defence,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Justified, I think.’

Professor Craft peered back out at the crowd. Her mouth pressed in a thin line. ‘Oh, very well.’

Without further explanation, the two of them made for the staircase. The rest glanced around at each other for a moment, at a loss for what to do.

Robin reached to open the window with one hand, fumbling around his inner front pocket with the other. Victoire grasped his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Griffin’s bar,’ he murmured. ‘You know, the one—’

‘Are you mad?’