The Praise Singer by Mary Renault Page A

bodies on the midden, I said laughing, “That’s where I nearly went, I daresay.” He went quite white, before covering it with some silly joke. I hastened to share it; we laughed like a pair of idiots. I’d guessed the truth from his face: as a child, he’d heard our parents debating whether to keep me. Perhaps for a long time after, in his simplicity, he’d supposed they might change their minds. No wonder he’d thought the ugly baby, whom only he befriended, belonged more to him than them.
    “Well,” he said presently, slapping me on the back, “the father wants now to keep you in the family. Don’t say I told you; but he wants you to take over the Euboian land.”
    “Me?” I stared at him unbelievingly. “But why? He might as well offer me a ship to pilot. I’ve forgotten everything I knew about farming; and besides, I’ve my life to live.”
    “Cool down! He doesn’t want you to farm it. Old Phileas can do it in his sleep; he’s been steward for ten years. The father just thinks that a son who does such credit to us all should have a proper estate. All this has touched him in his pride, you know.”
    “I can see,” I said, “that he doesn’t want me singing in taverns for a living. Of course I don’t intend to. But if one of us is to live like a landed gentleman, with a steward to do the work, it should be you, not me. The gods know, you’ve earned it.”
    “Oh, it was I put it into his head. You’ve never seen the Euboian farm, have you? Nor had I, before you went away.” I remembered how the air at home had seemed to lighten, when our father went to visit it. “I’ve been over once or twice since then. It’s good land, horse-pasture mostly, though the olives bear well. The plan is that it’s to be your portion, and this place will be mine.”
    All this was slowly coming home to me. “If you say it’s good, it is. But meantime, I’d be caretaking, and I need to travel.”
    “He knows that. I told him all about it. He’s quite willing you go to the festivals to sing-or anywhere else respectable, is the way he put it! You’re to draw half the yield from the place in his lifetime; and you won’t be skimped on that. Look now, Sim. You’ll be a famous man before you’ve done, that I can see; but even so, you’ll live hand to mouth, unless you’ve something behind you. Only think of all those famous men in Ionia, and yourself for that matter; prospering one day, fugitives the next. If you’d owned some land, would you have hung on in Samos? No slavemaster like an empty belly, the saying goes.”
    I saw, at last, all he had done for me; and for my master, to whom I could give a home in his last years. My tongue was loosened, and I thanked him as best I could.
    He was pleased, as he’d always been when I looked up to him as a child. Why not? If it was a weakness, I loved him for it and was glad to indulge it; it was a small enough return. “You see,” he said, “I talked to that judge from Athens, who came to your victory feast. I asked him where a poet would do best, now Ionia’s overrun, and he said, ‘In Athens, if all goes well there.’ He says Pisistratos looks to be settled in the tyranny for life. The people want him, most of the lords put up with him, and he’s exiled the few who won’t. He hasn’t spilled much blood, he governs well. This man says he’ll bring back the great days of Theseus.”
    “So he said to me. But they said the same about Polykrates.”
    “Ah. But now you won’t have to look for bread. Euboia’s so close to Attica, it’s no more than a ferry-crossing. You can live on the estate, and just go over for the festivals to show what you can do. If this is another fellow who’s only for flattery and fancy-boys, never mind; you’ll have seen Athens, which sounds to me worth seeing. I don’t see how you can lose.”
    “Prokles asked me to be his guest, and said he’d show me the city. But I thought, then, that to be another tyrant’s suppliant