The Praise Singer (3 page)

We were now well away from the house. He said, “Sing me one of yours.”

For this at least I had come prepared. I sang my most ambitious ode. The temple at Koressia is a healing one, dedicated to Apollo of the Mice. He has his own sacred ones, white with pink ears. After pondering for some time how to make mice sound dignified, I had addressed them as “Bold plunderers of Demeter’s hoarded store,” which I thought pretty well of. Such was the man’s magnanimity, he heard me through without so much as a smile.

“You have grasped the form very well. A good beginning. Now tell me, do you ever sing for yourself alone?”

“Well, sir,” I said after a while, “one always sings keeping sheep.”

He looked round. Not knowing Keos, he must have found this occupation surprising in my father’s son. He only said, “Yes, true. Sing me a shepherd’s song, then.”

I hesitated, now overcome with shyness. “It’s not a real poem, sir. It’s just a song.”

“Good, let me hear it. I’ve found stuff in those songs that Homer must have heard. They’re like agates on a beach; one picks them up rough, and polishes. Come, sing.”

I thought if I warned him I’d made it all up myself, he might think less of it. “It’s very long. It’s about Perseus, you see.”

“Indeed, many things befell him. Give me some part you like.”

I had been most of a year at it; if I had ever finished it, I daresay it would have outstretched the Odyssey. Shoots have been coming up from it for most of my later life. However, I remembered he had not breakfasted, and spared him the Killing of the Gorgons. “Well, sir, this is what Perseus sings to himself when he’s working at the nets on Seriphos, and the King won’t let him go away.”

The form at least was old; the kind of thing women sing as they twirl the spindle, or tread before the loom. I had lifted it as best I could, to give it a bolder feel, more by ear than by thought. Perseus is longing for wings to take him over sea, to the lands of monsters and marvels. When I sang it on the mountain, I became a fair-haired kouros six feet tall; the sheep had always accepted this transformation. Now I was Black Sim and must make the best of it. The song felt very naked sung like this. I thought I should have dressed it up more, like the mice.

At the end he waited awhile, in case I was stuck, not finished. This made me sure I had disgusted him. Then, seeing it was the end, he nodded two or three times. “Ah. There, now, is a voice.”

I felt as women must when told that the babe’s a boy. I just stood getting my breath. “Now tell me,” he went on briskly, “when is your father coming along to see me?”

I stared. I must have looked like an idiot yokel.

“Does he not think much of your singing? Never mind, he and I will ta?lk.”

“Sir!” I cried, finding my tongue at last, “he doesn’t know that I sing at all. I could never sing before my father.”

He did not ask why; just said, “I see,” and stood in thought.

“I’ve run away, sir. I should be with the sheep; but I did leave them cared for. Please hire me. He only likes my big brother. He’ll never grieve.”

“Do you always mind sheep?” he asked after a while.

“No, I help with the vines and the olives. I have to do the work of the season. Like Works and Days.”

“Does he tell you so? He is not quite indifferent to the poets, then.”

“Indeed he won’t miss me, sir. It’s not that we’re poor. He has the hired men, and five thralls as well. And the house-slaves, of course.”

“Then, even though you Keans live plainly, you cannot have known much hardship. Do you understand the life of a minstrel’s boy?”

“It’s different, sir, if it’s what you want to do. I never heard a real poet before, I know that now. Now I have, I can’t bear it here any more.”

He smiled; I perceived that bards are human. Then he sank into thought again. Presently he said, looking up suddenly, “I can’t be sure I shall need a second boy, if Endios recovers. Perhaps you can tell me, since you know these hills; they say there is a yellow berry with leaves like spear-blades, which is a cure for this kind of fever. Is it of any use?”

“Not the one here, sir. Don’t you go picking that. One of our thralls had a child that died of eating them.”

I’d answered without a second thought; he did not own he had been testing me till five years later, when he himself had fever and I was nursing him. I remember saying then, “But what would you have done, if I’d recommended the berries? I would still have made the song.”

“I greatly doubt it,” he said with his dry smile. “The grape tastes of its vineyard. I daresay I should have advised your father to let you study somewhere; so much was due to you. But oh no, I’d have had you nowhere about me. Apollo’s serpent has a healing tongue. I am not seduced by the dance of the painted adder.”

At the time, however, he just put his hand upon my shoulder, saying, “Never mind, the doctor is coming and we will trust in him. Come in, Sim, and let us see if Hagias’ good wife will find us a few barley-cakes. What is the rest of your name, son of Leoprepes?”

He called upon my father the same day.

Seeing he had promised this, you’d have thought that, when I got home, I would have said so to escape a beating. But I was as tongue-tied as ever in my father’s presence, baring my back more readily than my soul. I had never yet defied him-that would have come with the first stirrings of manhood-but when, asked where I had been, I could only mumble, “Over to Hagias’ house,” he thought me a liar, and defiant along with that. Theas had known what would happen, and, having no help to give, had gone off so as not to witness it. Afterwards I had to carry my sore back up to the sheep-pasture, resume my duties and send back the thrall.

Thus I was ignorant that Hagias called in advance to announce the bard’s arrival. When I had folded the sheep at evening, and come back with the dogs, I was amazed to find the best cloths and covers set out as if for a guest of honor. My parents, and even Theas, were wearing their grandest clothes (grand, that is, for Keos, where more than an inch of borderwork is against the law); and my father, seated in the master’s chair, looked as aweful as a carved Zeus in a temple. When their eyes all turned to me, it was too late to run out and spend the night in the sheep-pen.

“Come here, Simonides.” Except when presenting me to someone of importance, which was not oftener than he could help, I had never known him use my full name before. I stood before him rigid with dread.

“Tell me,” he said, “have I ever behaved to you otherwise than as a father?”

Since he was my father, and had always behaved like himself, I answered, “No.”

“I have done my best to train you as a son of mine, who should improve, not waste his patrimony. It has been n?o pleasure to me; you have shown small diligence and less skill. Yet you have thought fit, for reasons you best know, to hide from me your aptitude for a respected calling, and confide it to a stranger whom, till yesterday, you never saw in your life. Is it too much to ask how I have deserved it?”

I was stunned; most of all by finding I had power to wound him. I was fourteen, and had lived as best I knew how. At last I said, “I thought, sir, that you wouldn’t like it.”

“Is this not Keos? Have you not been to the festivals like any other boy of decent birth? Have the Keans not their own lodge on Delos, for the singers and musicians we send to honor the god? Do you not suppose that if you had shown ability for anything at all, I would not have furthered it? Yet you have chosen to live like a sullen farm-hand, rather than my son; hiding from me all that would have encouraged my hopes of you, till you could send me news by a passing guest.”

I heard in horror. My former lot now seemed Elysium, compared with my promised future. I was to be trained under his eye for poetry, as I’d been trained for farming, works and days; I would have as much song left in me as a bird in the fowler’s net; and my muteness would be taken for defiance. I thought with longing of the lonely hills and the sheep.

“However,” my father said, “since this man is ready to undertake your schooling, and is of good repute, so be it. I hope you will do more credit to his teaching than you have done to mine.”

I had had a long full day, and a beating; my working chiton, which I’d put on to go shepherding, was stuck somewhere to my broken skin. While he was beating me I had hugged my secret and never cried. Now I’d had thrown at me, like a curse, the crown of my desires, it was too much.

I cried out, “Oh, thank you, sir!” then clapped my hands to my face and wept.

I only did as I must; I had no thought to punish him. Now that I’m old, I see it would have been kinder to rail or curse him. He would have known how to deal with that. When he saw me greet with tears of joy the news of my escape from him, some truth pierced his heart. He lived long enough to see me held in honor; he accepted our friends’ felicitations when I won a prize. But I always knew that in the cup of his pride those tears still lingered, like drops of wormwood. To the day of his death, he never really forgave me.

3

NEXT DAY I went to my master.

My mother had brought out cloth from her chest, dipped in the famous red Kean dye, and had one of the women slaves make me a cloak. She even gave me a good copper brooch to fasten it, and two new tunics. Though she could not believe that any talent Theas lacked could be worth having, she had the family credit to think of. As I stood at the door 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 left of their own accord. Truly I owed poor Endios a tomb; he has saved my life many a time. Some of my best friends have been doctors, and excellent people they were, most knowledgeable about the minds of men, whom they see when poets do not. But doctors are taught their laws, and they keep those laws if it kills you. Some of them here in Sicily come asking how a wanderer like me has kept such good health to past fourscore. I tell them this or that. It would be uncivil to say that whenever in my travels I get a touch of fever, I go quietly to bed and send for the local wise-woman.

4

AMONG THE TROUBLES all men are heir to, I have had good things from the gods. I have been honored by kings and princes and cities, and by men of my own craft, and have been pleased with it, more I daresay than men with less need of esteem. I have rejoiced in what I made: in making it, in singing it, in getting paid for it, all delightful things. But brightest of all, after nearly seventy years, shines in my memory the day I sailed from Keos.