But even as they trembled, not one of them broke. It was only a wish, after all. And the Army was on its way.
‘Let’s not tarry,’ said Professor Craft, and they ascended the stairs to their respective floors.
Robin remained in the centre of the lobby beneath the broken chandelier, surrounded by eight pyramids of silver bars as tall as he stood. He took a deep breath, watching the second hand tick across the clock above the door.
Oxford’s bell towers had long gone mute. As the minute drew near, the only indication of the time was the synchronized ticking of the grandfather clocks, all positioned in the same place on every floor. They’d chosen six o’clock on the dot; an arbitrary time, but they needed a final moment, an immovable fact on which to fix their will.
One minute to six.
He loosed a shaky breath. His thoughts flew about, casting desperately for anything to think about that was not this. He landed not on coherent memories but on hyperspecific details – the salty weight of the air at sea, the length of Victoire’s eyelashes, the hitch in Ramy’s voice just before he burst out into full-bellied laughter. He clung to them, lingered there as long as he could, refused to let his mind go anywhere else.
Twenty seconds.
The warm grittiness of a scone at Vaults. Mrs Piper’s sweet, floury hugs. Buttery lemon biscuits melting into nectar on his tongue.
Ten.
The bitter taste of ale, and the biting sting of Griffin’s laughter. The sour stink of opium. Dinner at the Old Library; fragrant curry and the burnt bottoms of oversalted potatoes. Laughter, loud and desperate and hysterical.
Five.
Ramy, smiling. Ramy, reaching.
Robin placed his hand on the nearest pyramid, closed his eyes, and breathed, ‘Fānyì. Translate.’
The sharp ring echoed through the room, a siren’s screech, reverberating through his bones. A death rattle, resounding all the way up and down the tower, for everyone had carried out their duty; no one had balked.
Robin exhaled, trembling. No space for hesitation. No time for fear. He moved his hand to the bars in the next pile and whispered again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’ Again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’ And again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’
He felt a shifting beneath his feet. He saw the walls trembling. Books tumbled off the shelves. Above him, something groaned.
He thought he’d be scared.
He thought he’d be fixated on the pain; on how it might feel when eight thousand tons of rubble collapsed on him at once; on whether death might be instant, or whether it might come in horribly small increments when his hands and limbs were crushed, when his lungs struggled to expand in an ever-tinier space.
But what struck him most just then was the beauty. The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.
For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.
He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air that day smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love.
‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’
‘Me too,’ Ramy said.
‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’
‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’
‘Because you’re fascinating.’
‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’
The ceiling was starting to crumble; first streams of pebbles, then whole chunks of marble, exposing planks, breaking beams. The shelves collapsed. Sunlight streaked the room where before there had been no windows. Robin looked up and saw Babel, falling in and upon him, and beyond that, the sky before dawn.
He shut his eyes.
But he’d waited for death to come before. He remembered this now - he knew death. Not so abruptly, no, not so violently. But the memory of waiting to fade was still locked in his bones; memories of a stale, hot room, of paralysis, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace. As the windows smashed in, Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face.
She smiles. She says his name.
Epilogue
Victoire
Victoire Desgraves has always been good at surviving.
The key, she has learned, is refusing to look back. Even as she races north on horseback through the Cotswolds, head bent against the whipping branches, some part of her wants to be in the tower, with her friends, feeling the walls come down around them. If they must die, she wants them to be buried together.
But survival demands severing the cord. Survival demands she look only to the future. Who knows what will happen now? What happened in Oxford today is unthinkable, its ramifications unimaginable. There is no historical precedent for this. The juncture is shot. History, for once, is fluid.
But Victoire is familiar with the unthinkable. The liberation of her motherland was unthinkable even as it happened, for no one in France or England, not even the most radical proponents of universal freedom, believed that slaves – creatures they never thought fell under their categories of rational, rights-holding, enlightened men – would demand their own liberation. Two months after news broke of the August 1791 uprising, Jean Pierre Brissot, himself a founding member of the Amis des Noirs, announced to the French Assembly that this news must be false, for as anyone knew, slaves were simply incapable of such rapid, coordinated, defiant action. A year into the revolution, many still believed that soon the unrest would be quelled, that things would go back to normal, for normal meant white dominance over Blacks.
They were, of course, wrong.
But who, in living history, ever understands their part in the tapestry? For the better part of her life, Victoire was not even aware she hailed from the world’s first Black republic.
Here is all she knew, before Hermes:
She was born in Haiti, Ayiti, in 1820, the same year that King Henry Christophe, fearing a coup, took his own life. His wife and daughters fled to the home of an English benefactor in Suffolk. Victoire’s mother, a maid of the exiled queen, went with them. She referred to this always as their great flight and, once she set foot in Paris, refused ever to think again of Haiti as home.
Victoire’s understanding of Haitian history is of curses in the night; of a magnificent palace named Sans Souci, home to the first Black king in the New World; of men with guns; of vague political disagreements she does not understand that, somehow, uprooted her life and sent her across the Atlantic. As a child she knew her motherland as a place of violence and barbaric power struggles, for that is how they spoke of it in France, and that was what her exiled mother chose to believe.