The Praise Singer Read Online Free PDF Page A

with my bundle on my shoulder, she urged me to behave myself and obey my teacher; my father told me to work hard, and not try to do anything the easy way. To his mind, there was something wrong with any instruction a boy found pleasing. Theas ran after me, out of sight of home, and gave me a heavy silver double drachma.
    “Don’t let this man knock you about,” he said. “If he ill-treats you, come home. It will be one bad day with the father, and after that I’ll take care of you.” He was always a peacemaker, and not only when it saved him trouble. Even war, which he excelled at later, he never went into lightly. There are men whom Ares would have reaped on a bloody field, if my brother had not been.
    At Hagias’ farm, my coming was hardly noticed, the doctor being there to physic the sick boy. When he had gone, Kleobis, who was in need of sleep, left me to tend the sickroom. Endios had been bled, and was looking white; I had heard him cry as the knife went in. When I gave him milk, he gazed for a moment at this new ill-favored face, but was too weak to be curious. He lay with closed eyes; I sat wondering how we would get on when he was better. Soon he began to vomit and purge; he said, as I sponged him, that it was from the physic. I told him, to cheer him up, that it would ?drive out the evil humors; I had heard the physician say so. But I could not see, myself, that he had got much good from it.
    After supper, Kleobis sent me to my bed on the far side of the room, while he kept watch. At first the boy’s moaning disturbed me, but it quietened, and I slept with the soundness of my youth, till I felt myself shaken. I thought I was at home, with my father rousing me. But no one rebuked my laziness. Kleobis said, “Go out for a while, Sim. You can come back later.” There was a blanket drawn right over the other bed, and no movement in it.
    I had never been near a corpse except at funerals. It seemed only a moment since he’d talked to me. Two slave-women came in to wash and anoint his body, since he had no kin there. I went out over the dry summer grass, tasting its freshness after the close air inside. Light slanted over the hill, touching the topmost olive-sprays. I said to his shade-it could not have gone far yet-“I did wish it; but only for a while, and I never prayed for it. Do not be angry.”
    Later on, when I came back to Keos, I bought a carved stone for his stranger’s grave, knowing I owed it him.
    Kleobis came out to me, by the flat rock where he had stood to sing. His face was yellow and drawn with watching; the boy had not died till almost dawn. He said, “I ought to have let him go.”
    I remembered his good clothes, better than my brother’s. “But, sir, he wanted to learn from you, he wasn’t poor?”
    “Only in talent. He should have gone home, to strum a lyre at the drinking, and give his mother grandsons. But he was strong, and useful, and willing. And his father ransomed me once from pirates. I could not turn him off too soon.”
    “How old was he?”
    “Fifteen, I think. He had a beautiful treble, before it broke. When the choir went to Delos, I heard him sing the solo. Everyone said he looked like the young Apollo. His parents had always heard him praised; I could not refuse to take him.”
    In the house, one of the slave-women was wailing over the body, from kindness, or remembering grief of her own. Kleobis said, “When I saw in the brush your ugly face, my son, touched by the god, and beautiful, I thought, ‘Ah, now’s the time. I will buy Endios his passage home, in a good ship, and send word to his father that he has learned all I can teach him.’ But too late. The god did not require this sacrifice.”
    I listened gravely, and ventured no reply. Later, I’ve asked myself if Apollo’s arrow was not shot by his son Asklepios. The doctor had been the best in Iulis; but it did seem to me that the evil humors in the boy had been expelled too forcibly, when they might have