‘Then why’d you leave?’ asked Robin.
‘Someone needs to be in the Old Library full time. In any case, I’d got tired of the campus life, so I faked my death in Barbados, bought a passage on the next packet home, and made my way back to Oxford unnoticed.’ Anthony winked at Robin. ‘I thought you had me that day at the bookshop. I didn’t dare leave the Old Library for a week. Come on, let me show you the rest.’
A quick tour of the workspaces past the shelves revealed a number of ongoing projects, which Anthony introduced with pride. These included the compilation of dictionaries between regional languages (‘We lose a lot by assuming everything must first come through English’), non-English silver match-pairs (‘Same principle – Babel won’t fund match-pairs that don’t translate into English since all of its bars are for use by the British. But that’s like painting with only one colour, or playing only one note on a piano.’), and critiques of existing English translations of religious texts and literary classics (‘Well – you know my opinion on literature in general, but something has to keep Vimal occupied.’) The Hermes Society was not only a hotbed of Robin Hoods, as Griffin had led Robin to believe; it was also a research centre in its own right, though its projects had to be done in secret, with scant and stolen resources.*
‘What are you going to do with all this?’ asked Victoire. ‘You can’t publish, surely.’
‘We’ve got partners at a few other translation centres,’ said Vimal. ‘We ship them work for review, sometimes.’
‘There are other translation centres?’ asked Robin.
‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s only recently that Babel achieved pre-eminence in linguistics and philology. It was the French who ran the show for most of the eighteenth century, and then the German Romanticists had their heyday for a bit. The difference now is that we have silver to spare, and they don’t.’*
‘They’re fickle allies, though,’ said Vimal. ‘They’re helpful insofar as they, too, hate the British, but they’ve no real commitment towards global liberation. Really, all this research is just gambling on the future. We can’t make good use of it yet. We haven’t got the reach or the resources. So it’s all we can do to produce the knowledge, write it down, and hope one day there exists a state that can put all this to proper, altruistic use.’
At the other end of the library, the back wall resembled the aftermath of several mortar explosions, charred and cratered across the centre. Underneath, two equally charred tables stood side by side, both somehow upright despite their blackened, shrivelled legs.
‘Right,’ said Anthony. ‘So that’s our silver-work and, er, munitions workshop.’
‘Did that happen over time, or all at once?’ Victoire asked drily.
‘That’s entirely Griffin’s fault,’ said Vimal. ‘Doesn’t seem to think gunpowder is an outdoor activity.’
The intact portion of the back wall was covered with a massive map of the world, dotted with differently coloured pins attached by strings to notes covered in dense, tiny handwriting. Robin wandered closer, curious.
‘That’s a group project.’ Cathy joined him before the map. ‘We add to it little by little when we get back from overseas.’
‘Do all of these pins represent languages?’
‘We think they do. We’re trying to track the number of languages still spoken around the world, and where they’re dying out. And there are a good deal of languages which are dying, you know. A great extinction event began the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World. Spanish, Portuguese, French, English – they’ve been edging out regional languages and dialects like cuckoo chicks. I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’ She sighed, looking up at the map. ‘I was born a generation too late. It’s not so long ago that I might have grown up around Gaelic.’
‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’
‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’
‘Come on, you two.’ Anthony waved them over to a doorway, which led to a small reading room that had been converted into a dining room. ‘Let’s eat.’
The offerings at dinner were global – a vegetable curry, a platter of boiled potatoes, a fried fish dish that tasted startlingly similar to a kind Robin had once eaten in Canton, and a flat, chewy bread that paired well with everything else. The eight of them sat around a very fine ornamented table that looked incongruous against the plain wooden panels. There weren’t enough chairs for all of them, so Anthony and Ilse had dragged over benches and sitting stools from around the library. None of the tableware matched, nor the silverware. Flames burned merrily from a fireplace in the corner, heating the room unevenly so that Robin’s left side dripped sweat while his right side felt chilly. The whole scene was quintessentially collegial.
‘Is it just you lot?’ Robin asked.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Vimal.
‘Well, you’re . . .’ Robin gestured around the table. ‘You’re all very young.’
‘Necessarily,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s dangerous business.’
‘But aren’t there – I don’t know—’
‘Proper adults? Reinforcements?’ Anthony nodded. ‘Some, yes. They’re scattered across the globe. I don’t know who they all are – not one of us knows exhaustively who they all are, and that’s intentional. There are probably even Hermes associates at Babel I’m still not aware of, though whoever they are, I hope they start making a bit more of an effort.’
‘That, and attrition’s a problem,’ said Ilse. ‘Take Burma.’
‘What happened in Burma?’ asked Robin.
‘Sterling Jones happened,’ Anthony said tightly, but did not elaborate.
This seemed a sensitive topic. For a moment, everyone stared at their food.
Robin thought of the two thieves he’d met his first night at Oxford, the young woman and the blond-haired man, neither of whom he’d ever seen again. He did not venture to ask. He knew the answer: attrition.
‘But how do you get anything done?’ asked Ramy. ‘That is, if you don’t even know who your allies are?’
‘Well, it’s not so different from Oxford bureaucracy,’ Anthony said. ‘The university, the colleges, and the faculties never seem to agree on who’s in charge of what, but they get things done, don’t they?’
‘Langue de bœuf sauce Madère,’ Cathy announced, setting a heavy pot in the centre of the table. ‘Beef tongue in Madeira sauce.’
‘Cathy loves to serve tongue,’ Vimal informed them. ‘She thinks it’s funny.’
‘She’s creating a dictionary of tongues,’ said Anthony. ‘Boiled tongue, pickled tongue, dried tongue, smoked—’
‘Shush.’ Cathy slid onto the bench in between them. ‘Tongue’s my favourite cut.’
‘It’s the cheapest cut,’ said Ilse.
‘It’s disgusting,’ said Anthony.
Cathy flung a potato at him. ‘Fill up on these, then.’
‘Ah, pommes de terre à l’anglaise.’ Anthony speared a potato with his fork. ‘You know why the French called boiled potatoes à l’anglaise? Because they think boiling things is boring, Cathy, just like all of English cooking is deathly boring—’
‘Then don’t eat them, Anthony.’
‘Roast them,’ Anthony persisted. ‘Braise them with butter, or bake them with a cheese – just don’t be so English.’
Watching them, Robin felt a sharp prickle at the base of his nose. He felt the same as he had the night of the commemoration ball, dancing on the tables under the fairy lights. How magical, he thought; how impossible, that a place like this could exist, a distillation of all that Babel promised. He felt he’d been looking for a place like this all his life, and still he’d betrayed it.