The Persian Boy Read Online Free PDF

years,” I said, “and a little more.”
    “I don’t understand it. Let me look again. But this is beautiful work; I never saw cleaner scars. It would surprise me, cutting a boy with your looks, if they took more than just enough to keep you beardless. Of course it can go wrong. The cuts can fester so deep that all the roots of feeling are eaten away. Or they can butcher you so that nothing is left for feeling, as they do with the Nubians, I suppose from fear of their strength. But with you, short of giving her fill to a woman- and few of us can do that, though one hears of it now and then-I can’t see why you shouldn’t enjoy it with the best. Do you tell me you have suffered this since you began?”
    “What?” I cried. “Do you think I let myself be moved by those sons of pigs?” Here was one to whom I could speak at last. “There were one or two . . . But I used to think myself away from it, when I could.”
    “I see. Now I begin to guess the trouble.” He lay in thought, as grave as a physician, then said, “Unless it is women. You don’t think of women, do you?”
    I remembered the three girls hugging me by the pool, and their round soft breasts; then my mother’s brains spilled on the orchard pebbles, and my sisters screaming. I answered, “No.”
    “Never think of them.” He looked at me ea?rnestly, his lightness gone. “Don’t imagine, if your beauty keeps its promise, that they won’t be after you, sighing and whispering, and vowing to be content with anything you have. So they may believe; but they never will. No; in their discontent they will turn spiteful, and betray you. The surest way to end on a spike in the sun.”
    His face had turned somber. I saw there some dreadful recollection, and, to reassure him, told him again I never thought of them.
    He caressed me consolingly, though the pain had left me. “No, I don’t know why I considered women. It is clear enough what it is. You have fine senses; for pleasure certainly, for pain therefore as much. Though gelding is bad enough for anyone, there are degrees of feeling. It has haunted you ever since, as if it could happen again. That’s not so rare; you’d have got over it long ago, with me. But you have been going with men you despised. Outwardly you had to obey; within, your pride has conceded nothing. You have preferred pain to a pleasure by which you felt degraded. It comes of anger, and the soul’s resistance.”
    “I didn’t resist you,” I said.
    “I know. But it has bitten deep; it won’t be cured in a day. Later we’ll try again, it’s too soon now. With any luck in your life, you will outgrow it. And I can tell you one thing more; where you’re going now, I don’t think it will much trouble you. I have been told to say no more, which is taking discretion to absurdity; but no matter, to hear is to obey.”
    “I wish,” I said, “I might belong to you.”
    “I too, Gazelle-Eyes. But you are for my betters. So don’t fall in love with me; we shall be parting all too soon. Put your clothes on; the getting-up ceremonial we’ll do tomorrow. The lesson has been long enough for today.”
    My training took some time longer. He came earlier, dispensed with the haughty eunuch, and taught me himself the service of the table, the fountain court, the inner chamber, the bath; he even brought a fine horse, and in the weed-grown courtyard showed me how to mount and ride with grace; all I’d learned at home was how to stick on my mountain pony. Then we went back to the room with its green glimmering windows and great bed.
    He still hoped to exorcise my demon, giving much patience to it; but the pain always returned, its strength increased by the pleasure it had fed on. “No more,” he said. “It will be too much for you, and not enough for me. I am here to teach, and am in danger of forgetting it. We must accept that this is your lot just now.”
    I said in grief, “I’d be better off like those others, feeling