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

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.

Then, always, the strange, tentative imagining of what a ceasefire might look like. Should they write up a contract with terms of amnesty? Yusuf took charge of this, drafting a treaty that saved them from the gallows. When the tower resumed normal functioning, would they be a part of it? What did scholarship look like in the age after empire, when they knew Britain’s silver stores would dwindle into nothing? They had never considered these questions before, but now, when the outcome of this strike stood on a razor’s edge, their only comfort was in prognosticating the future in such detail that it seemed possible.

But Robin couldn’t bring himself to try. He couldn’t bear those conversations; he excused himself whenever they occurred.

There was no future without Ramy, without Griffin, without Anthony and Cathy and Ilse and Vimal. As far as he was concerned, time had stopped when Letty’s bullet had left the chamber. All there was now was the fallout. What happened after was for someone else to struggle through. Robin only wanted it all to end.

Victoire found him on the rooftop, hugging his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth to the sound of gunfire. She sat down beside him. ‘Bored with legal terminology?’

‘It feels like a game,’ he said. ‘It feels ludicrous – and I know this, all of this, was ludicrous to begin with, but that – talking about after – just feels like an exercise in fantasy.’

‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’

‘They were better than us.’

‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’

Chapter Thirty

Westminster Bridge fell.^*

Chapter Thirty-One

Westminster Bridge fell, and Oxford broke out in open warfare.

They were crowded around the telegraph machine, waiting anxiously for an update, when one of the gunmen rushed in from upstairs and caught his breath before announcing, ‘They’ve killed a girl.’

They followed him to the rooftop. With his naked eye Robin could see a commotion up north in Jericho, a frenzied movement of the crowd, but it took a moment of fumbling with a telescope before he honed in on what the gunmen were pointing at.

Soldiers and labourers at the Jericho barricade had just exchanged fire, the gunman told them. Usually this led to nothing – warning shots echoed throughout the city at all times, and the sides usually took turns firing before retreating back down behind the barricades. Symbolic; it was all supposed to be symbolic. But this time a body had toppled.

The telescope lens revealed a startling amount of detail. The victim was young, she was white, she was fair-haired and pretty, and the blood blossoming from her stomach stained the ground a vivid, unmistakable scarlet. Against the slate-grey cobblestones, it looked like a flag.

She wasn’t wearing trousers. The women who’d joined the barricades usually wore trousers. She had on a shawl and a flowing skirt, and an upturned basket still hung from her left arm. She could have been on her way to buy groceries. She could have been on her way home to a husband, to parents, to children.

Robin straightened up. ‘Was it—’