Page 176 of Babel

Ibrahim nodded to his notebook. ‘Worth getting some of it down, then.’

‘It’s a good idea.’ Victoire took a seat. ‘I’ll play. Ask me anything. Let’s see if we can change some future historian’s mind.’

‘Perhaps we’ll be remembered like the Oxford Martyrs,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Perhaps we’ll get a monument.’

‘The Oxford Martyrs were tried for heresy and burned at the stake,’ said Robin.

‘Ah,’ said Ibrahim, eyes twinkling. ‘But Oxford’s an Anglican university now, isn’t it?’

Robin wondered in the days that followed if what they’d felt that night was a shared sense of mortality, akin to how soldiers felt sitting in trenches at war. For it was war, what was breaking out on those streets. Westminster Bridge had not fallen, not yet, but the accidents continued and the shortages grew worse. London’s patience was strained. The public demanded retribution, demanded action, in some form or another. And since Parliament would not vote no on the China invasion, they simply increased their pressure on the Army.

It appeared the guardsmen had orders to leave the tower itself alone, but were permitted to aim at individual scholars when they got the chance. Robin stopped venturing outside when a rendezvous with Abel Goodfellow was interrupted by a spate of rifle fire. Once, a window shattered next to Victoire’s head when she was searching the stacks for a book. They all dropped to the floor and crawled on hands and knees to the basement, where they were protected by walls on all sides. Later they found a bullet lodged in the shelf just behind where she’d been standing.

‘How is this possible?’ demanded Professor Craft. ‘Nothing penetrates these windows. Nothing gets through these walls.’

Curious, Robin examined the bullet: thick, warped, and unnaturally cold to the touch. He held it up to the light and saw a thin band of silver lining the base of the casing. ‘I suppose Professor Playfair thought of something.’

That raised the stakes. Babel was not impenetrable. This was not a strike any longer, but a siege. If the soldiers broke through the barricades, if soldiers wielding Professor Playfair’s inventions reached the front door, their strike was effectively over. Professor Craft and Professor Chakravarti had replaced Professor Playfair’s wards on their first night in the tower, but even they admitted they were not as good at this as Professor Playfair had been; they were not sure how well their own defences would hold up.

‘Let’s stay away from windows from now on,’ Victoire suggested.

For now the barricades held, though outside, the skirmishing had turned vicious. Initially Abel Goodfellow’s strikers had fought a purely defensive war from behind the barricades. They reinforced their structures, they ran supply lines, but they did not provoke the guardsmen. Now the streets had turned bloody. Soldiers fired regularly now on the barricaders, and the barricaders struck back in turn. They made incendiary devices with cloth, oil, and bottles and hurled them at the Army camps. They climbed the rooftops of the Radcliffe Library and the Bodleian, from which they threw paving stones and poured boiling water onto the troops below.

It shouldn’t have been so evenly matched, civilians against guardsmen. In theory, they shouldn’t have lasted a week. But many of Abel’s men were veterans, men discharged from an army falling into disrepair after the defeat of Napoleon. They knew where to find firearms. They knew what to do with them.

The translators helped. Victoire, who’d been reading furiously through French dissident literature, composed the match-pair élan-energy, the latter of which bore connotations of a particular French revolutionary zeal, and which could be traced back to the Latin lancea, meaning ‘lance’. Carried through was an association with throwing and momentum, and it was this latent distortion into the English energy that helped the barricaders’ projectiles fly further, hit truer, and make more of an impact than bricks and cobblestones ought to have been able to do.

They’d come up with a few wilder ideas which bore no fruit. The word seduce came from the Latin seducere, meaning ‘to lead astray’, from which the late-fifteenth-century definition ‘to persuade one to abandon their allegiance’ came about. This seemed promising, but they could not think of a way to manifest it without sending the girls into the front lines, which no one was willing to suggest, or dressing up Abel’s men in women’s clothes, which seemed unlikely to work. There was also the German word Nachtmahr, a now rarely used word for ‘nightmare’, which also referred to a malicious entity that sat upon the sleeper’s chest. Some experimentation proved this match-pair made bad dreams worse when one had them, but seemed unable to induce them in the first place.

One morning, Abel showed up in the lobby with several long, slender cloth-wrapped parcels. ‘Can any of you shoot?’ he asked.

Robin imagined aiming one of those rifles at a living body and pulling the trigger. He wasn’t sure that he could do it. ‘Not well.’

‘Not with those,’ said Victoire.

‘Then let some of my men in there,’ said Abel. ‘You’ve got the best vantage point in the city. Pity if you don’t use it.’

Day after day, the barricades held. Robin found it amazing that they didn’t shatter under the weight of the near constant cannon fire, but Abel was confident they could hold out indefinitely as long as they kept scrounging up new materials to bolster the damaged sections.

‘It’s because we’ve built them in V-shaped structures,’ he explained. ‘The cannonballs hit the protrusion, which only packs the materials in more tightly.’

Robin was sceptical. ‘They can’t hold forever, though.’

‘No, perhaps not.’

‘And what happens when they come pouring through?’ Robin asked. ‘Will you flee? Or will you stay and fight?’

Abel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘At the French barricades, revolutionaries would march up to the soldiers with their shirts open and shout at them to shoot, if they dared.’

‘Did they?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes they shot them dead on sight. But other times – well, think about it. You’re looking someone in the eyes. They’re around your age, or younger. From the same city. Possibly the same neighbourhood. Possibly you know them, or you see in their face someone you could know. Would you pull the trigger?’

‘I suppose not,’ Robin admitted, though a small voice in his mind whispered, Letty did.

‘Every soldier’s conscience has a limit,’ said Abel. ‘I suppose they’ll try to arrest us. But firing on townspeople? Carrying out a massacre? I’m not so sure. But we’ll force that split. We’ll see what happens.’

It will all be over soon.They tried to reassure themselves at night when they looked out over the city, saw the torchlight and cannon fire burning bright. They needed only to hold out until Saturday. Parliament could not sustain this any longer than they could. They could not let Westminster Bridge fall.