CHAPTER FOUR
The ballad was going badly.
Yeslin had envisioned clearly what he intended to create. The classic ballad structure was four stanzas, followed by a fifth stanza, called the “strangeness,” which twisted the ballad into a surprise ending.
He wanted to create a new type of ballad, in which the strangeness was doubled by adding a sixth verse. The listeners would be surprised . . . and then they would be surprised a second time.
The trouble was that there was no surprise yet in his ballad.
He had chosen a famous song for his experiment: “The Ballad of the Dying Prisoner.” It was famous because there were so many versions of it: every great balladeer had created a variation upon it. To create a new and exciting variant on this ballad was practically a prerequisite for demonstrating one’s talents as a balladeer.
The ballad was usually set in an unnamed prison, but Yeslin had chosen to spice it by placing it in a named prison: The Eternal Dungeon. His hero, of course, was a commoner prisoner, and the villain was that notorious torturer, the High Seeker. The ballad mocked the High Seeker’s pitiful efforts to break the will of the commoner by means of torture. In the end, the prisoner died, but not before having a good laugh at the High Seeker’s expense.
The ballad was too straightforward. That was its problem. Everything else about it was right: the contrast between good and evil, the stirring depiction of the strength of commoners against the oppressive elite, and above all, the details he now possessed of how the Eternal Dungeon’s prisoners were torn apart on the rack, both physically and mentally.
He hesitated, pen in hand, and then, with great reluctance, he added a new character: a young Seeker, naive and well-meaning, who was corrupted by the High Seeker into believing that torture was the proper means by which to convince prisoners that they have done wrong.
He wrote another version of the ballad and then covered his face with his hands. He could feel the solidity beneath his elbows of the desk in the High Seeker’s living quarters. How, Yeslin wondered, would the High Seeker’s love-mate react when he learned that he was now a villain in a ballad?
Finally, Yeslin pushed himself away from the desk and rose from the wooden chair. Through the wall, faintly, he could hear the chatting of the day-shift stokers as they worked. He supposed that he ought to approach them now and recruit them into his guild. He had many hours in which to do so; the day shift had only just begun. Or he could return to the boarding house where he roomed, in order to receive some much-needed sleep. Elsdon, learning that Yeslin was trying to write ballads in a crowded and noisy dormitory for young men, had promptly offered him use of the desk that the High Seeker and his love-mate shared, along with a key to lock up after he was finished. The High Seeker’s own key, Yeslin gathered. He wondered what Layle Smith would say about that, once he returned from mourning. The least Yeslin could do was not press matters by falling asleep on the High Seeker’s bed.
He slumped down in the parlor’s armchair and stared up at the ceiling. Would Elsdon ever forgive Yeslin for what he was about to do? Despite his choice of career, Elsdon retained a great deal of honor – could he understand that Yeslin’s own honor drove him to oppose what was done to prisoners in the Eternal Dungeon? Would the introduction of that new character be the wedge that drove apart the brothers? It was like finding himself pulled resisting into a nightmarish ballad.
He continued staring at the ceiling, watching it grow dark. Eventually he realized he was asleep, and awoke.
It was then that he saw Elsdon, sitting in the desk chair, holding the ballad and waiting for Yeslin to awake.
Yeslin moved slowly, rubbing his stiff neck as he straightened in the chair. He could still hear the day-shift stokers talking outside. He hadn’t overslept, then.
“You’re home early,” Yeslin commented, unable to take his eyes off the ballad in Elsdon’s hands.
“I finished early with my current prisoner. Ordinarily, I would have done documentwork until I was assigned a new prisoner, but Weldon Chapman informed me that there was some trouble brewing amidst the stokers. He asked me whether I knew anything about it.” Naked-faced, Elsdon gave a grimace of a smile. “He was kind enough not to say, ‘We had no problems with the stokers until your kinsman arrived.’ But he told me I could take the rest of the night off.” Elsdon’s hand tightened on the ballad. “Yeslin, how could you?”
Toeing his way gently upon this briar-strewn path, Yeslin said, “You knew that I planned to recruit workers to my guild.”
“I wasn’t referring to that – though you might have had the mercy to let me know that you’d already started your recruiting. I was referring to this.” Elsdon held up the ballad. “Yeslin, I told you about the procedures in the rack room in confidence! How could you betray my trust in you? More importantly, how could you plot to break your oath of silence?”
Yeslin sighed. “I took no oath.”
Elsdon waited. He was mighty good at waiting for prisoners to confess their crimes, Yeslin recalled.
So Yeslin explained, very briefly, what had happened in the majordomo’s room. By the time he finished, Elsdon’s expression had turned wry.
“Careless of Mistress Moore,” he commented. “There’s a reason why we require witnessed oaths. Very well – I’m sorry I unjustly accused you of oath-breaking. But the rest of this . . .” He looked down at the ballad. “Yeslin, is that really how you see us? As witless or black at heart? And even if you do, is a tale this simple likely to win you any listeners?”
He was taken aback. The last thing he had expected from Elsdon at this juncture was literary criticism.
Elsdon saw his surprise and gave a small smile. “I know Layle. He was born in Vovim, you see – the land of the artists. And so I know that what would bother him most about this ballad isn’t that it reveals the secrets of the Eternal Dungeon. What would bother him most is that it’s false.”
Yeslin frowned. He made an instinctive move to take hold of the ballad again, in order to reread it; Elsdon’s fingers tightened on the ballad, so Yeslin let his hand fall. Instead he said, “You were the one who supplied the details of how prisoners are searched.”
“Some prisoners, yes. If you think we place most prisoners here on the rack . . . It doesn’t matter. The falseness lies in your portrayal of the characters. Why, your hero doesn’t have a single blemish! No man or woman I’ve met in my life, no matter how innocent, has been that pure. Your ballad is as much a caricature of commoners as it is of Seekers.”
Elsdon Taylor – Yeslin reflected, not for the first time – was very good at his work. Yeslin steeled himself to fight back. “Perhaps. I’ll consider whether the ballad should be rewritten. But the fact remains that the lighted world needs to know what goes on in this dungeon. It needs to know the methods you use to break prisoners.”
“You can’t reveal that, Yeslin,” Elsdon said steadily, sitting quietly on the wooden chair. “You can’t reveal facts that we need kept secret in order to do our jobs.” He pointed at the ballad. “Here, in the fourth stanza, you reveal that the racks aren’t designed to kill prisoners. Don’t you realize that most of the prisoners we break on the rack are broken out of simple fear that they will die, horribly maimed, if they don’t confess? If you reveal that the rack is merely designed to give pain and fear, not to kill, then we will have less chance of obtaining confessions—”
“Seeker,” said Yeslin, his voice turning cold, “that is your problem, not mine. I’m not going to write a ballad that allows you to torture your prisoners well. I don’t believe that torture is ever right. You should understand why . . . from what Father did to you.”
There was a gap in the conversation. Outside, the cheerful stokers were laughing at some shared joke. Faintly beyond them, Yeslin could hear a prisoner screaming.
Elsdon was quiet again when he replied. “What Father did to me, all those years ago, isn’t the same as what I do to my prisoners. I know that’s hard for you to understand, because you’ve ne
ver witnessed the transformation of a prisoner.”
“Nay?” He tilted his head, allowing his voice to fall back into dialect. “Well, it may be that one day you’ll have the chance to practice your ‘transformation’ on me, in the rack room. But not today, mate. If you’ll give me my ballad, I’ll be on my way.”
“No,” said Elsdon softly. “You won’t be. I can’t let you go.”
He felt a chill trickle across his skin then. It took him a moment before he could say, “I thought you told me that you don’t possess the power to make arrests.”
“I told you the truth. Yeslin, please listen to me.” Elsdon leaned forward, earnestness written across his face. “You’re in danger of falling into the same error our father did: of seeing evil where none exists. Why do you think so many abuses have occurred in prisons? Because the prison workers convinced themselves beforehand that the men and women they questioned were guilty.” Elsdon leaned back in his chair, pointing with his free hand to the ballad. “Whatever you may think, balladeer, I’m not your enemy. Neither is the High Seeker. But if you think we are, can I at least convince you to depict us as something more than caricatures?”
He looked down at the ballad, uneasiness spreading inside him. “What did you have in mind?”
“I’m not sure. . . .” Elsdon frowned, his face screwed up in concentration, looking so much like his father at that moment that Yeslin felt his breath taken away.
He could leave, he knew. He could reconstruct the ballad outside the dungeon, send word to the stokers of what had happened to him. That would be wisest, rather than allow Elsdon time to hand him over to the High Seeker. Layle Smith, Yeslin was quite sure, would have no qualms about strapping Yeslin to a rack, regardless of what powers of arrest the High Seeker did or did not possess.
But Yeslin knew how much he owed to Elsdon. Not only for the adoption, but for what might have come before that.
It was Elsdon, not Yeslin, who had endured years of misuse at Auburn Taylor’s hands. It was Elsdon whose shocking murder and imprisonment had convinced his father to try a different type of upbringing with the street-lad that he had brought home soon afterwards. If it had not been for Elsdon, and the suffering he had undergone, Yeslin might have endured as much pain in the hands of his new father as he had endured at the hands of his birth-parents.
He owed it to Elsdon to listen. So he waited tensely, like a soldier standing under a truce flag, awaiting terms of peace from an opposing enemy.
“I’ll have to ask the Codifier for permission,” murmured Elsdon.
“Sorry?” said Yeslin, not at all reassured by these words.
Elsdon shook himself, as though awakening from sleep. “I didn’t mean to mumble. It’s just . . . Yeslin, what if I gave you another ballad? A true ballad, about a real prisoner and about the real Seeker who searched him?”
Yeslin felt his heart plummet. He had hoped for better than this from Elsdon. “A prisoner who was freed by the Seekers, you mean?”
“No,” said Elsdon softly, and for the first time pain laced his voice. “No, he died. I wish I could have helped him more than I did. In the end, it was he who helped me.”
o—o—o
“It didn’t work.”
Wade, who had drawn the short straw to be the guild member who approached Mr. Chapman with the guild’s demands, stood frowning in their agreed meeting-spot: the little cubby-hole in the outer dungeon where the stokers ate their meals. The other stokers exchanged looks. Finally Leo voiced what they all were thinking: “You sure you done it right, man? Did you say it the way we all agreed?”
“You think I’m a fool?” flung back Wade. Wisely not awaiting an answer, he added, “I told him all about the strike in Mip: how the commoners sat down on the job, thousands of them, and the power company couldn’t produce no power, and the new men wasn’t trained yet, and the new equipment wasn’t there yet, and the power company was losing money hand over fist each hour that the commoners struck, so the company had no choice but to make contracts with the guild members that let them keep their jobs.” Wade wiped his hand across his brow. “Master Chapman, he just stood there with that mild little smile of his. Then he said, ‘How many Mippite commoners did you say made these demands?’
“‘Thousands!’ I told him.
“‘Thousands,’ he repeated. ‘I suppose there must be thousands of stokers in Yclau.’
“Well, I didn’t rightly know what he was getting at, but I said, ‘Yeah, there must be.’
“And he just tilted his head, like I was a prisoner he was breaking on the rack, and he said, ‘How many of these thousands of stokers are members of your new guild?’”
Wade paused. This time it was Jerry who broke the silence; he stood up and threw his pail across the room. It landed against the wall with a crash. The other stokers had begun to curse.
Curt looked from one man to another. “I don’t see.”
“Take your blinders off, lad,” said Leo gruffly. “Even Wade can add it up. Thousands of stokers in Yclau . . . and only a dozen of us promising to sit down on the job if we don’t get our way. The Seekers will bring in outside stokers to take over our jobs.”
“Fuck, they don’t even have to do that.” Wade sat down on his pail and ran a weary hand through his hair. “Master Chapman, he said he’d split up the day-shift stokers, have half of them take over our jobs for the time being. Guess he means he’d make them work twice as hard, then fire them all when this ’lectrifying comes round.”
“And him a stoker,” said Curt bitterly.
“He’s not a stoker now,” said Yeslin. “He has become one of the elite.”
It was a mistake to draw attention to himself at that point, he reflected afterwards. In the next moment, every glare in the cubby-hole was directed at him.
“Aye?” growled Leo. “And did you anticipate this happening, Master Yeslin?”
Being called “master” stung; it was the old-fashioned pronunciation for the word that once meant “slave-master.”
He straightened up his back but did not rise to his feet from where he sat on his own stool. If he needed to be standing to keep control over these men, then he didn’t have the qualities needed to be a guild leader.
“It’s called strike-breaking,” he explained to the fist-furled men frowning down at him. “I knew that it could happen, yes. It was a possibility. We’ll have to take steps to stop the strike-breakers, so that our strike will be successful—”
“No!”
Wade’s sharp word caused everyone to swing round to look at the First District stoker. He too was remaining sitting on his pail, not bothering to stand.
“Nay?” said Jerry. “What’s the matter, Wade, you got a queasy stomach? Or maybe you don’t want to fight against your masters?”
“First District men never do,” said Leo dismissively and turned his back on Wade, returning his wrath to Yeslin. “You got a better plan, you’d best cough it up, lad, ’cause now’s the time—”
“I said, No.” Wade’s voice was quieter this time, yet somehow firmer. It drew all eyes to his direction. Yeslin found himself rising to his feet to see the First District stoker better.
Wade waited until everyone was looking at him, then said simply, “Ain’t none of you going to speak up for the prisoners?”
A short, painful silence followed, which everyone else seemed to interpret better than Yeslin did. There were hunched shoulders, looks of guilt exchanged. Finally Jerry said, in a gruff voice, “You agreed to the strike too.”
“Then I was a fool!” shot back Wade. “We sit down on the job, and who’s going to suffer? Not the Seekers – they’re used to sleeping without heat in their cells, and they got their oil-lamps for light. So who’s going to suffer?” He looked around at the other stokers.
It was left to Yeslin to slowly reach the conclusion that the other men had already reached. “The prisoners,” he said in a small voice.
“Yeah, boy, the prisoners.” Wade didn’t even bot
her to look in the direction of the outsider troublemaker who had taken so long to realize this; he was reserving his frowns for the others. “We all knew that. So why were we so all-fired eager to keep our jobs? ’Cause we don’t care what happens to those commoners in the cells? We don’t care if they sit there shivering in the dark?”
“Mr. Chapman will have the day-stokers care for them—” started Curt.
“We know that now!” shouted Wade. “We didn’t know that then. We didn’t know that when we went to Master Chapman, demanding our rights. Well, here’s what I think of our rights. Hand me a light, Jer.” Jerry silently pulled out his tobacco box, which he kept pocketed during his visits to the Eternal Dungeon, and waited until Wade had used his penknife to snap the threads holding his guild badge to his shirt. Then Jerry handed him the match, and they all watched as Wade lit his guild badge, waited until it was well burnt, then let it fall to the floor, where he ground it underfoot.
“That’s what I think of your guild and its lighted-world notions of commoners’ rights,” Wade told Yeslin. “You don’t care ’bout the commoners. You only care ’bout your fucking guild. Well, I don’t know about you boys,” he said, addressing the remaining stokers, “but me, I’m willing to suffer for the sake of the prisoners.” He picked up his shovel and stalked out of the room.
There was a small silence as Yeslin stared at where he had been, the final words of Wade’s speech – so very different from the way the man usually spoke – still ringing in his ears. Finally Yeslin heard himself say, “Where did that come from?”
Leo shot him a look and snorted. Jerry, more kindly, laid a hand on Yeslin’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t know,” he said. “You haven’t been here long enough, aye?”
“I’m ready to get back to work,” Curt declared. “Anyone coming with me?”
There were general nods of agreement as the men picked up their shovels and stowed away their pails. Within a couple of minutes, they were all gone, leaving Yeslin staring at the empty room.
The Eternal Dungeon: a Turn-of-the-Century Toughs omnibus Page 73