Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

They threw themselves into the work. Suddenly the tower felt just as it did during exam season. They sat in rows on the eighth floor, heads hunched over their texts, and the only sounds in the room were pages flipping and the occasional exclamation when someone stumbled upon a promising nugget of etymology. This felt good. Here at last was something to do, something that kept them from dawdling nervously as they awaited news from the outside.

Robin rooted through stacks of notes he’d found in Professor Lovell’s office, which contained many potential match-pairs prepared for the China campaign. One excited him very much: the Chinese character 利 (lì) could mean to sharpen one’s weapon, though it also carried connotations of profit and advantage, and its logogram represented grain being cut with a knife. Knives sharpened with the 利-sharp match-pair had frightfully thin blades, and unerringly found their targets.

‘How is that useful?’ asked Victoire when he showed her.

‘It helps in a fight,’ said Robin. ‘Isn’t that the point?’

‘Do you think you’re going to get in a knife fight with someone?’

He shrugged, annoyed and now a little embarrassed. ‘It could come down to that.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You want it to, don’t you?’

‘Of course not, I don’t even – of course not. But if they get in, if it becomes strictly necessary—’

‘We’re trying to defend the tower,’ she told him gently. ‘We’re just trying to keep ourselves safe. Not leave a field of blood in our wake.’

They began living like defenders under siege. They consulted classical texts – military histories, field manuals, strategic treatises – for ideas on how to run the tower. They instituted strict mealtimes and rations; no nibbling of the biscuits at midnight, as Ibrahim and Juliana had been caught doing. They hauled the rest of the old astronomy telescopes out onto the rooftop so they could keep watch over the deteriorating city. They set up a series of rotating two-hour surveillance shifts from the seventh- and eighth-floor windows so that when the next riots began, they’d see them coming from far away.

A day passed like this, and then another. It finally sank in that they’d passed the point of no return, that this was no temporary divergence; there would be no resumption of normal life. They emerged from here the victors, the harbingers of an unrecognizable Britain, or they left this tower dead.

‘They’re striking in London.’ Victoire shook his shoulders. ‘Robin, wake up.’

He bolted upright. The clock read ten past midnight; he’d just fallen asleep, preparing for a graveyard watch. ‘What? Who?’

‘Everyone.’ Victoire sounded dazed, as if she couldn’t believe it herself. ‘Anthony’s pamphlets must have worked – I mean, the ones addressing the Radicals, the ones about labour, because look—’ She waved a telegram at him. ‘Even the telegraph office. They say there’ve been crowds around Parliament all day, demanding that they withdraw the war proposal—’

‘Who’s everyone?’

‘All the strikers from a few years ago – the tailors, the shoemakers, the weavers. They’re all striking again. And there’s more – there are dock workers, factory employees, gasworks stokers – I mean, really, everyone. Look.’ She shook the telegram. ‘Look. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow.’

Robin squinted at the missive in the dim light, trying to comprehend what this meant.

A hundred miles away, white British factory workers were crowding Westminster Hall to protest a war in a country they’d never stepped foot in.

Was Anthony right? Had they forged the most unlikely of alliances? Theirs was not the first of the antisilver revolts of that decade, only the most dramatic. The Rebecca Riots in Wales, the Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham, and the Chartist uprisings in Sheffield and Bradford just earlier that year had all tried and failed to halt the silver industrial revolution. The papers had made them out to be isolated outbursts of discontent. But it was clear now that they were all connected, all caught in the same web of coercion and exploitation. What was happening to the Lancashire spinners had happened to Indian weavers first. Sweating, exhausted textile workers in silver-gilded British factories spun cotton picked by slaves in America. Everywhere the silver industrial revolution had wrought poverty, inequality, and suffering, while the only ones who benefited were those in power at the heart of the Empire. And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear. Until it did.

And if the oppressed came together, if they rallied around a common cause – here, now, was one of the impossible pivot points Griffin had spoken of so often. Here was their chance to push history off its course.