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" 'Nothing, really,' he said 'You go where you wish to go and do what you wish to do What will sustain you, how you will live, these are things you ure out for yourself ¡¯

" 'How did you do it?' I asked

" 'Oh, you ask o back so reat writer of the Greek tragedy just before and during the ti of a roa for the theater, and he had traveled into India, where he bought me from a man I scarcely remember who kept me for his bed, and had educated me for his library, and who sold ht me home to Athens to copy for hie delightedof the chorus and of the solitary actor whom Thespis had introduced into the mix of the early theater as it was then

" 'My Master wrote scores of plays -- satires, coedies He wrote odes to celebrate victorious athletes He wrote long epic poe

ht to copy or merely to listen "Wake up, Arion, wake up, you won't believe what I've done here!" he would say, shakinga cup of water into my hands You know that meter and rhythm were much more important to the Greeks back then He was the past h with his pure cleverness

" 'He wrote for every festival, every contest, every conceivable excuse, and was ever busy on every detail of the perforht precede it or the painting of the masks to be used It was his life That is, eren't traveling

" 'It was his joy to go to other Greek colonies and there participate in the theater as well, and it was here in Italy that he encountered the sorceress who gave hi then in the Etruscan city that would later beco on a theatrical in the festival of Dionysus for the Greeks

" 'I can still reht he ca to do with ht me into his presence and clumsily he drank from me, and when it seeaveand desperate and pleading with me to understand that he didn't knohat had happened to him

" 'We were neophytes together We were Children in the Blood together He burnt his plays, all of them He said that all he had written orthless He was no ht sorcerers and witches to try to find some way to cure the Evil Blood in hi himself when scarcely twenty-five years had passed He left me a hardened orphan

" 'But I have always been a resourceful soul, and, never wanting death, have not been tempted by it I saw Greece fall to Rome I saw my Master's plays in the bookshops and thetime -- centuries I sawRoman boys, and then I saw the rise of Christianity and the loss of thousands of works -- poetry, the drama, yes, even plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides lost -- history, letters -- and with thee of a precious few from those days when I had known so many

" 'I am content I am resourceful still I deal in diamonds and pearls I use the Mind Gift to make me rich I cheat no one I am clever beyond what I need And I keep Petronia alith me I love the company of Manfred He and I play chess and cards and we talk and we roaether I re that she had had to keep a bargain

" 'They had met here in Naples, she and he, and she had taken a fancy to visiting the swa there a hideaway It had seemed to her an appropriate wilderness froamblers of New Orleans and all the Southland And eventually, he built her a domicile and a fancy tomb such as she desired, and she loved to retreat to that place whenever she was angry with me, or whenever she wanted as new and raw, and would be away fro had been done a hundred times over

" 'But in tiive him the Blood, because she had told him what she was, and at last she had had to keep her word, or so I told her, and do it she did, and brought him here, so that those he loved would think he had died in the swampland

" 'Noill be the saine that you died in the swamp Is that not so?¡¯

"I didn't answer him