‘Because of jealousy and avarice,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Scarcity’s never been an issue.[107] We simply don’t like the Cambridge scholars. Nasty little upstarts, thinking they can make it on their own.’
‘No one goes to Cambridge unless they can’t find a job here,’ Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Sad.’
Robin cast them an amazed look. ‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’
‘Well, yes.’ Professor Craft lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘It’s Oxford, what did you expect?’
Still Parliament refused to cooperate. Every night the Foreign Office sent them the same telegram, always worded in precisely the same way, as if shouting a message over and over again could induce obedience: CEASE STRIKE NOW STOP. In a week, these offers stopped including an offer of amnesty. Shortly after that, they came with a rather redundant threat attached: CEASE STRIKE NOW STOP OR ARMY WILL TAKE BACK THE TOWER STOP.
Very soon the effects of their strike became deadly.[108] One of the major breaking points, it turned out, was the roads. In Oxford, but even more so in London, traffic was the dominant problem facing city officials – how to manage the flow of carts, horses, pedestrians, stagecoaches, hackney carriages, and wagons without gridlock or accidents. Silver-work had kept pile-ups at bay by reinforcing wooden roads, regulating turnpikes, reinforcing toll gates and bridges, ensuring smooth turns by carts, replenishing the water pumps meant for suppressing dust, and keeping horses docile. Without Babel maintenance, all of these minute adjustments began to fail one by one, and dozens died as a result.
Transportation tipped the domino that led to a slew of other miseries. Grocers could not stock their shelves. Bakers could not obtain flour. Doctors could not see their patients. Solicitors could not make it to court. A dozen carriages in London’s richer neighbourhoods had made use of a match-pair by Professor Lovell that played on the Chinese character 輔 (fǔ), which meant ‘to help’ or ‘to assist’. The character had originally referred to the protective sidebars on a carriage. Professor Lovell had been due in London to touch them up mid-January. The bars failed. The carriages were now too dangerous to drive.[109]
Everything they knew would transpire in London was already happening in Oxford, for Oxford, by proximity to Babel, was the most silver-reliant city in the world. And Oxford was rotting. Its people were going broke, they were hungry, their trades had been interrupted, their rivers were blocked up, their markets had shut down. They sent out to London for food and supplies, but the roads had become perilous, and the Oxford-to-Paddington line was no longer running.
The attacks on the tower redoubled. Townspeople and soldiers together crowded the streets, shouting obscenities at the windows, skirmishing with men at the barricades. But it made no difference. They could not hurt the translators, who were the only people who could end their misery. They could not get past the tower’s wards, could not burn it down or set explosives at its base. They could only beg the scholars to stop.
We only have two demands, Robin wrote in a series of pamphlets, which had become his way of responding to the town’s outcries. Parliament knows this. Refusal to go to war, and amnesty. Your fate lies in their hands.
He requested that London capitulate before all these things came to pass. He hoped, and knew, they would not. He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn.
Victoire did not like this. Every time they ascended to the eighth floor, they quarrelled over which resonance bars to pull out, and how many. He wanted to deactivate two dozen; she wanted only two. Usually, they settled on five or six.
‘You’re pushing things too fast,’ she said. ‘You haven’t even given them a chance to respond.’
‘They can respond whenever they like,’ said Robin. ‘What’s stopping them? Meanwhile, the Army’s already here—’
‘The Army’s here because you pushed them to it.’
He made an impatient noise. ‘I’m sorry I won’t be squeamish—’
‘I’m not being squeamish; I’m being prudent.’ Victoire folded her arms. ‘It’s too fast, Robin. It’s too much all at once. You need to let the debates settle. You need to let public opinion turn against the war—’
‘It’s not enough,’ he insisted. ‘They won’t reason themselves into justice now when they never have before. Fear’s the only thing that works. This is just tactics—’
‘This is not coming from tactics.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘It’s coming from grief.’
He couldn’t turn around. He didn’t want her to see his expression. ‘You said yourself you wanted this place to burn.’
‘But even more,’ said Victoire, placing a hand on his shoulder, ‘I want us to survive.’
It was impossible to say, in the end, how much of a difference the pace of their destruction really made. The choice remained with Parliament. The debates continued in London.
No one knew what was going on inside the House of Lords, except that neither the Whigs nor the Radicals felt good enough about their numbers yet to call a vote. The papers revealed more about public sentiment. The mainstream rags expressed the opinion Robin had expected, which was that the war on China was a matter of defending national pride, that invasion was nothing more than a just punishment for the indignities imposed by the Chinese on the British flag, that the occupation of Babel by foreign-born students was an act of treason, that the barricades in Oxford and the strikes in London were the work of brutish malcontents, and that the government ought to hold firm against their demands. Prowar editorials stressed the ease with which China would be defeated. It would only be a little war, and not even a proper war at that; all it took was the ignition of several cannons and the Chinese would admit defeat within a day.
The papers could not seem to make up their minds about the translators. The prowar publications offered a dozen theories. They were in cahoots with the corrupt Chinese government. They were co-conspirators of mutineers in India. They were malicious ingrates with no agenda at all except a desire to hurt England, to bite the hand that had fed them – and this required no further explanation, for it was a motive that the British public were all too ready to believe. We will not negotiate with Babel, promised members of Parliament on both sides. Britain does not bow to foreigners.[110]
Yet not all the papers were against Babel or for the war. Indeed, for every headline that urged swift action in Canton, there was another by a publication (albeit smaller, more niche, more radical) that called the war a moral and religious outrage. The Spectator accused the prowar party of greed and profiteering; the Examiner called the war criminal and indefensible. JARDINE’S OPIUM WAR A DISGRACE, read one headline by the Champion. Others were not so tactfuclass="underline" DRUGGY MCDRUGGY WANTS HIS THUMBS IN CHINA read the Political Register.
Every social faction in England had an opinion. The abolitionists put out statements of support for the strikers. So too did the suffragists, though not quite so loudly. Christian organizations printed pamphlets criticizing the spread of an illegal vice to an innocent people, though the prowar evangelists responded with the supposedly Christian argument that it would in fact be God’s work to expose the Chinese people to free trade.
107
The Baresch alphabet used on the resonance rods, for instance, is not strictly necessary to their function; it was created by Babel scholars solely so that its proprietary resonance technology would remain inscrutable to outsiders. It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.
108
Abel brought them a running stream of gruesome updates. On the Cherwell, a houseboat collided with a transport barge when the navigation systems of both failed, causing a steaming pile-up in the middle of the river. Three people died, trapped in submerged cabins. Up in Jericho, a four-year-old child was crushed under the wheels of a carriage which ran amok. Out in Kensington, a seventeen-year-old girl and her lover were buried alive when the ruins of a church tower collapsed above them during a midnight tryst.
109
On a Wednesday, two carts collided, one of which was loaded with barrels of fine brandy. When the sweet fumes leaked out onto the street, a small crowd of bystanders rushed in to scoop up the brandy with their hands, and it was all good fun until a man with a lit pipe walked into the fray, turning the street into a conflagration of people, horses, and exploding barrels.
110
The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage.
But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word