One nasty thought crept into his mind – It’s because you’re a wounded little boy, and you wish they had paid you more attention – but he pushed this away. Surely he could not be so petty; surely he was not merely lashing out at his father because he felt dismissed.
He had seen and heard enough. He knew what Babel was at its roots, and he knew enough to trust his gut.
He ran his finger over the wood. His nails would not do. A knife would have been ideal, but he’d never carried one. At last, he pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and pressed the tip into the knob. The wood gave purchase. He scratched hard several times to make the cross visible – his fingers ached, and the nib was irreversibly ruined – but at last he left his mark.
Chapter Seven
Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet.
The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth.
CHARLES V
The following Monday, Robin returned to his room after class to find a slip of paper wedged under his windowsill. He snatched it up. Heart hammering, he shut his door and sat down on the floor, squinting at Griffin’s cramped handwriting.
The note was in Chinese. Robin read it twice, then backwards, then forwards again, perplexed. Griffin seemed to have strung together characters utterly at random and the sentences did not make sense – no, they could not even be described as sentences, for although there was punctuation, the characters were arranged without care for grammar or syntax. This was a cipher, surely, but Griffin had not given Robin a key, and Robin could think of no literary allusions or subtle hints Griffin might have dropped to help him decode this nonsense.
At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English. He ripped a sheet of paper from his diary, placed it next to Griffin’s note, and wrote out the romanization of each character. Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code.
The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after.
Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn.
Curt, direct, and minimally informative – just like Griffin. It rained constantly at Oxford. The next rainy night could be tomorrow.
Robin read the note again and again until he’d committed the details to memory, then tossed both the original and his decryption into the fireplace, watching intently until every scrap had shrivelled to ash.
On Wednesday, it poured. It had been misty all afternoon, and Robin had watched the darkening sky with accumulating dread. When he left Professor Chakravarti’s office at six, a soft drizzle was slowly turning the pavement grey. By the time he reached Magpie Lane, the rain had thickened to a steady patter.
He locked himself in his room, put his assigned Latin readings on his desk, and tried to at least stare at them until the hour came.
By half past eleven, the rain had announced its permanence. It was the kind of rain that sounded cold; even in the absence of vicious winds, snow, or hail, the very pattering against cobblestones felt like cubes of ice hammering against one’s skin. Robin saw now the reasoning behind Griffin’s instructions – on a night like this, you couldn’t see more than a few feet past your own nose, and even if you could, you wouldn’t care to look. Rain like this made you walk with your head down, shoulders hunched, indifferent to the world until you got to somewhere warm.
At a quarter to midnight, Robin threw on a coat and stepped into the hallway.
‘Where are you going?’
He froze. He’d thought Ramy was asleep.
‘Forgot something in the stacks,’ he whispered.
Ramy cocked his head. ‘Again?’
‘I suppose it’s our curse,’ Robin whispered, trying to keep his expression blank.
‘It’s pouring. Go and get it tomorrow.’ Ramy frowned. ‘What is it?’
My readings, Robin almost said, but that couldn’t be right, because he’d purportedly been working on them all night. ‘Ah – just my diary. It’ll keep me up if I leave it, I’m nervous about anyone seeing my notes—’
‘What’s in there, a love letter?’
‘No, it’s just – it makes me nervous.’
Either he was a spectacular liar, or Ramy was too sleepy to care. ‘Make sure I get up tomorrow,’ he said, yawning. ‘I’m spending all night with Dryden, and I don’t like it.’
‘Will do,’ Robin promised, and hastened out the door.
The punishing rainfall made the ten-minute walk up High Street feel like an eternity. Babel shone in the distance like a warm candle, each floor still fully lit as if it were the middle of the afternoon, though hardly any silhouettes were visible through the windows. Babel’s scholars worked round the clock, but most took their books home with them by nine or ten, and anyone still there at midnight was not likely to leave the tower until morning.
When he reached the green, he paused and peered around. He saw no one. Griffin’s letter had been so vague; he didn’t know if he should wait until he glimpsed one of the Hermes operatives, or if he should go ahead and follow his orders precisely.
Do not deviate from my instructions.
The bells rang for midnight. He hurried up to the entrance, mouth dry, breathless. When he reached the stone steps, two figures materialized from the darkness – both black-clad youths whose faces he could not make out in the rain.
‘Go on,’ one of them whispered. ‘Hurry.’
Robin stepped up to the door. ‘Robin Swift,’ he said, softly but clearly.
The wards recognized his blood. The lock clicked.
Robin pulled the door open and paused for the briefest moment on the doorstep, just long enough for the figures behind him to slink into the tower. He never saw their faces. They dashed up the staircase like wraiths, quick and silent. Robin stood in the foyer, shivering as rain dripped down his forehead, watching the clock as the seconds ticked towards the five-minute mark.
It was all so easy. When the time came, Robin turned and strode out the door. He felt a slight bump at his waist, but otherwise perceived nothing: no whispers, no clinks of silver bars. The Hermes operatives were swallowed by the dark. In seconds, it was as if they had never been there at all.
Robin turned and walked back toward Magpie Lane, shivering violently, dizzy with the sheer audacity of what he’d just done.
He slept badly. He kept tossing in his bed in a nightmarish fugue, soaking his sheets with sweat, tortured by half dreams, anxious extrapolations in which the police kicked down his door and dragged him off to gaol, declaring they’d seen everything and knew everything. He did not fall properly asleep until the early morning, and by then he was so exhausted he missed the morning bells. He did not awake until the scout knocked at his door, asking if he’d like his floors swept that day.
‘Oh – yes, sorry, just give me a moment and I’ll be out.’ He splashed water on his face, dressed, and dashed out the door. His cohort had arranged to meet in a study room on the fifth floor to compare their translations before class, and now he was terribly late.
‘There you are,’ said Ramy when he arrived. He, Letty, and Victoire were all seated around a square table. ‘I’m sorry I left without you, but I thought you’d gone already – I knocked twice but you never answered.’