‘Most of them, yes,’ said Vimal.
‘All the French releases? As soon as they come out?’
‘Yes, greedy,’ he said, with absolutely no malice. ‘You’ll find our book-buying budget is effectively limitless, and our librarians like to maintain a thorough collection. Though we can’t translate everything that comes through here; we just haven’t the manpower. Translating ancient texts still occupies a good part of our time.’
‘Which is why they’re the only department that runs a deficit every year,’ said Anthony.
‘Bettering one’s understanding of the human condition is not a matter of profit.’ Vimal sniffed. ‘We’re always updating the classics – between the past century and now, we’ve become a lot better at certain languages, and there’s no reason why classics should remain so inaccessible. I’m currently working on a better Latin version of the Bhagavad Gita—’
‘Never mind that Schlegel just put one out,’ Anthony quipped.
‘Over ten years ago,’ Vimal dismissed. ‘And the Schlegel Gita is dreadful; he said himself that he hadn’t grasped the basic philosophy that underlies the whole thing. Which shows, because he’s used about seven different words for yoga—’
‘Anyway,’ Anthony said, ushering them away, ‘that’s Literature. One of the worst applications of a Babel education, if you ask me.’
‘You don’t approve?’ Robin asked. He shared Victoire’s delight; a life spent on the fourth floor, he thought, would be wonderful.
‘Me, no.’ Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m here for silver-working. I think the Literature Department are an indulgent lot, as Vimal knows. See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages – know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they’re too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channelled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.’
The fifth and sixth floors housed both instruction rooms and reference materials – the primers, grammars, readers, thesauruses, and at least four different editions of every dictionary published in what Anthony claimed was every language spoken in the world.
‘Well, the dictionaries are really scattered all over the tower, but here’s where you come if you need to do some archival heavy lifting,’ Anthony explained. ‘Right in the middle, you see, so no one ever has to walk more than four flights to get what they need.’
In the centre of the sixth floor, a series of red-bound books sat on crimson velvet cloth beneath a glass display case. The way the soft lamplight gleamed against their leather covers made them look quite magical – more like magicians’ grimoires than common reference materials.
‘These are the Grammaticas,’ said Anthony. ‘They look impressive, but it’s all right, you can touch. They’re meant to be consulted. Just wipe your fingers on the velvet first.’
The Grammaticas were bound volumes of varying thicknesses but identical binding, arranged alphabetically by the Romanized name of the language and by publication date within those languages. Some Grammatica sets – notably the European languages – took up entire display cases on their own; others, largely the Oriental languages, contained very few volumes. The Chinese Grammaticas spanned only three volumes; the Japanese and Korean Grammaticas contained only one volume each. Tagalog, surprisingly, spanned five volumes.
‘But we can’t take credit for that,’ said Anthony. ‘All of that translation work was done by the Spanish; that’s why you’ll also see Spanish-to-English translator credits behind the cover pages. And a good deal of the Caribbean and South Asian Grammaticas – here they are – are still in progress. Those languages weren’t of interest at Babel until after the Peace of Paris, which of course dumped a great deal of territory into Britain’s imperial holdings. Similarly, you’ll find most of the African Grammaticas are translated into English from German – it’s the German missionaries and philologists who are doing the most work there; we haven’t had anyone doing African languages for years.’
Robin couldn’t help himself. He reached eagerly for the Oriental language Grammaticas and began thumbing through the front material. Written on the cover page of each volume in very neat, tiny handwriting were the names of those scholars who had produced the first edition of each Grammatica. Nathaniel Halhed had written the Bengali Grammatica, Sir William Jones the Sanskrit Grammatica. This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages.
‘It’s only recently that we’ve done much in Oriental languages at all,’ said Anthony. ‘We were lagging behind the French there for quite a while. Sir William Jones made some headway introducing Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian to the courses lists when he was a fellow here – he started the Persian Grammatica in 1771 – but he was the only one doing any serious work in those languages until 1803.’
‘What happened then?’ asked Robin.
‘Then Richard Lovell joined the faculty,’ said Anthony. ‘I hear he’s something like a genius with Far Eastern languages. He’s contributed two volumes to the Chinese Grammatica alone.’
Reverently, Robin reached out and pulled the first volume of the Chinese Grammatica towards him. The tome felt inordinately heavy, each page weighted down by ink. He recognized Professor Lovell’s cramped, neat handwriting on each page. It covered an astonishing breadth of research. He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell – a foreigner – knew more about his mother tongue than he did.
‘Why are these under display cases?’ asked Victoire. ‘Seems rather difficult to take them out.’
‘Because these are the only editions in Oxford,’ said Anthony. ‘There are backups at Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Foreign Offices in London. Those are updated annually to account for new findings. But these are the only comprehensive, authoritative collections of knowledge of every language that exist. New work is added by hand, you’ll notice – it costs too much to reprint every time new additions are made, and besides, our printing presses can’t handle that many foreign scripts.’
‘So if a fire tore through Babel, we could lose a full year of research?’ asked Ramy.
‘A year? Try decades. But that’ll never happen.’ Anthony tapped the table, which Robin noticed was inlaid with dozens of slim silver bars. ‘The Grammaticas are better protected than the Princess Victoria. These books are impervious to fire, flood, and attempted removal by anyone who isn’t in the Institute register. If anyone tried to steal or damage one of these, they’d be struck by an unseen force so powerful they’d lose all sense of self and purpose until the police arrived.’
‘The bars can do that?’ Robin asked, alarmed.
‘Well, something close,’ Anthony said. ‘I’m just guessing. Professor Playfair does the protective wards, and he likes to be mysterious about them. But yes, the security of this tower would astound you. It looks like your standard Oxford building, but if anyone ever tried to break in, they’d find themselves bleeding out on the street. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘That’s a lot of protection for a research building,’ said Robin. His palms felt suddenly clammy; he wiped them on his gown.
‘Well, of course,’ said Anthony. ‘There’s more silver in these walls than in the vaults of the Bank of England.’
‘Truly?’ Letty asked.
‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel is one of the richest places in the entire country. Would you like to see why?’
They nodded. Anthony snapped his fingers and beckoned for them to follow him up the stairs.