Page 43 of Babel

Chapter Seven

Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet.

The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth.

CHARLES V

The following Monday, Robin returned to his room after class to find a slip of paper wedged under his windowsill. He snatched it up. Heart hammering, he shut his door and sat down on the floor, squinting at Griffin’s cramped handwriting.

The note was in Chinese. Robin read it twice, then backwards, then forwards again, perplexed. Griffin seemed to have strung together characters utterly at random and the sentences did not make sense – no, they could not even be described as sentences, for although there was punctuation, the characters were arranged without care for grammar or syntax. This was a cipher, surely, but Griffin had not given Robin a key, and Robin could think of no literary allusions or subtle hints Griffin might have dropped to help him decode this nonsense.

At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English. He ripped a sheet of paper from his diary, placed it next to Griffin’s note, and wrote out the romanization of each character. Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code.

The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after.

Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn.

Curt, direct, and minimally informative – just like Griffin. It rained constantly at Oxford. The next rainy night could be tomorrow.

Robin read the note again and again until he’d committed the details to memory, then tossed both the original and his decryption into the fireplace, watching intently until every scrap had shrivelled to ash.

On Wednesday, it poured. It had been misty all afternoon, and Robin had watched the darkening sky with accumulating dread. When he left Professor Chakravarti’s office at six, a soft drizzle was slowly turning the pavement grey. By the time he reached Magpie Lane, the rain had thickened to a steady patter.

He locked himself in his room, put his assigned Latin readings on his desk, and tried to at least stare at them until the hour came.

By half past eleven, the rain had announced its permanence. It was the kind of rain that sounded cold; even in the absence of vicious winds, snow, or hail, the very pattering against cobblestones felt like cubes of ice hammering against one’s skin. Robin saw now the reasoning behind Griffin’s instructions – on a night like this, you couldn’t see more than a few feet past your own nose, and even if you could, you wouldn’t care to look. Rain like this made you walk with your head down, shoulders hunched, indifferent to the world until you got to somewhere warm.

At a quarter to midnight, Robin threw on a coat and stepped into the hallway.

‘Where are you going?’

He froze. He’d thought Ramy was asleep.

‘Forgot something in the stacks,’ he whispered.

Ramy cocked his head. ‘Again?’

‘I suppose it’s our curse,’ Robin whispered, trying to keep his expression blank.

‘It’s pouring. Go and get it tomorrow.’ Ramy frowned. ‘What is it?’

My readings, Robin almost said, but that couldn’t be right, because he’d purportedly been working on them all night. ‘Ah – just my diary. It’ll keep me up if I leave it, I’m nervous about anyone seeing my notes—’

‘What’s in there, a love letter?’

‘No, it’s just – it makes me nervous.’

Either he was a spectacular liar, or Ramy was too sleepy to care. ‘Make sure I get up tomorrow,’ he said, yawning. ‘I’m spending all night with Dryden, and I don’t like it.’

‘Will do,’ Robin promised, and hastened out the door.

The punishing rainfall made the ten-minute walk up High Street feel like an eternity. Babel shone in the distance like a warm candle, each floor still fully lit as if it were the middle of the afternoon, though hardly any silhouettes were visible through the windows. Babel’s scholars worked round the clock, but most took their books home with them by nine or ten, and anyone still there at midnight was not likely to leave the tower until morning.

When he reached the green, he paused and peered around. He saw no one. Griffin’s letter had been so vague; he didn’t know if he should wait until he glimpsed one of the Hermes operatives, or if he should go ahead and follow his orders precisely.

Do not deviate from my instructions.

The bells rang for midnight. He hurried up to the entrance, mouth dry, breathless. When he reached the stone steps, two figures materialized from the darkness – both black-clad youths whose faces he could not make out in the rain.