The Praise Singer: A Novel

2

I WAS UP IN the dark next day, before even the thralls were stirring. Going to the shed, I found the best of them just awake. He’d been a smallholder on Kythnos, the next island, who had pledged himself after a bad harvest, having no surety for a loan. Next harvest had been worse; the landlord had foreclosed on him, and, having all the hands he needed, sold him away. Even though he was getting a fuller belly from us than he’d had on Kythnos, I always pity a freeborn thrall. You only find them now in the backward places; in Athens, the good Solon freed them before I was born. I said, “Tell the master I shan’t be minding the sheep today.” The less he knew, the better for us both. I saw him eye my best tunic; he liked but rather despised me, thinking me poor stuff for a husbandman, and thankful no doubt that I was not the heir. He thought the world of Theas; whom I’d left sleeping, innocent of my truancy. It was only fair; even he was not immune from our father’s anger.

At sunup I reached the house of Hagias. He was up and about, and greeted me civilly with a cup of watered wine, boy-strength; though, knowing my father, he was clearly amazed to see me not at work. I had mother wit enough to thank him for the pleasure of his feast, as if sent with this message, before asking to speak with Kleobis the bard.

In this I could hardly claim to be my father’s envoy; and Hagias, of course, asked me what I wanted: adding that their guest was sleeping still, having sat up late with his boy, who was sick with fever.

“I know, sir,” I said. “So he’ll be needing a boy who’s well. I want to ask him to hire me.”

By now Hagias’ wife had come up; she had been bustling about with the women slaves, clearing up after the feast. They both stared at me as if I were off my head. Presently Hagias smiled and stroked his beard; he was a stout good-natured fellow, though rather pompous. “My dear Sim—for so I have heard your kinfolk call you, and I speak as a family friend—boys will be boys and have their fancies, and you’ll not find me a telltale. Why, at your age my fancy was to travel south, and fight for the King of Egypt. But my old friend Leoprepes would be grieved, you know, at this prank of yours. Because he trains you on the farm, so that you’ll prosper when you come to manhood, you don’t suppose he’d let you work as servant to another man? That’s all this boy is, no more; carries luggage, hires mules, looks after the lyre and so on.” My face must have brightened, for he frowned. “Just a menial, and you are son to one of the first men in the deme. What nonsense have you taken into your head? Do you want to be a poet?” And he laughed so heartily that the slaves all turned to stare.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Till now, he’d just thought I wanted to run away from home, which could have surprised no one who knew our family. Now I had put him at a loss for words. He was still in search of them, when from the room behind him the bard appeared, wishing him good day.

Hagias nodded to his wife to be about her business, and asked after his servant’s health. He replied that his pupil seemed a little easier. Then he looked straight at me, and smiled; a spare slight smile, like that between men who will talk about business presently.

Did this amaze me? Not so. I had had my sign on the mountain. It is only to the wise that Apollo speaks with a double tongue.

So I waited while he had a few more words with Hagias; then he said, “Was this lad here asking for me? I was expecting him.”

Hagias’ face changed in a moment. He could hardly have been more civil if I had been Theasides. It amazed me, I don’t know why. That barelegged boy in his outgrown tunic seems as strange to me now as an Ethiop to a Thracian. Yet I was once within him, and his soul has passed into mine. These are mysteries.

“Let us walk,” said Kleobis, and led me over the meadow into the olive grove. The pale green flowers were falling, the early sun shone in the leaves. Hagias watched us from the house like a true Ionian. Curiosity is our birthright. What else has made us seek out knowledge and skill?

While I was wondering if he had the gift of prophecy, Kleobis said, “I saw you in the brush, swaying to the music like Apollo’s snake. I knew you would be coming. Who is your father?”

I told him, and he said, “I have heard the name. How long have you wanted to be a poet?”

“I don’t know, sir. Before I knew what a poet was.”

He plucked a spray of olive flowers and held it up to the light. “Go on. It was the same with me.”

I spoke as best I could. Not as if to a friend; I had had no friend but my brother; but as if to a god in some small mountain shrine, who I could believe would listen. “You know, sir, how little boys sing who can just run about, and mostly it’s like the birds. But I sang in tune, all the songs the women sang at work. Then when I was older and went to the Apollo festivals, I started to make songs myself. Please, sir, hire me. I’ll work for nothing, just for my keep. If your boy gets better, I’ll do the rough work, and sleep in the shed with the thralls wherever you’re staying. I’ve a sheepskin for cold weather, I’ll only need my food. I’ll not even ask for music lessons. Just let me hear the songs.”

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 talk.”

“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 no 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.