So this morning, when Hannah had come down from her room dressed in only the ceremonial cotton robe, ornamented by just the small, traditional embroidered image of the caduceus—two blue snakes of healing twined around a staff—Odysseus had not been there to say good-bye to his young friend.
Ada had been furious as the two rode in one of Ardis’s droshkies to the fax pavilion. Hannah had wept a bit, turning her face away so that Ada wouldn’t see. Hannah had always been the toughest young woman Ada’d known—the artist and athlete, the risk-taker and sculptor—but this morning she’d seemed a lost little girl.
“Maybe he’ll pay attention to me after I return from the firmary,” Hannah had said. “Maybe I’ll seem like more of a woman to him tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” said Ada, but she was thinking that all men seemed to be self-serving, selfish, insensitive pigs, just waiting for an opportunity to act like greater self-serving, selfish, insensitive pigs.
Hannah had looked so fragile as the two servitors floated out of the fax pavilion, each taking one of Hannah’s arms, and led her to the faxportal. It was a beautiful day, clear blue sky, soft winds from the west, but it might as well have been raining so far as Ada’s mood would have dictated. She had no idea why she had this sense of doom—she’d seen scores of friends off to their various Twenty trips to the firmary and had gone herself, remembering only hazy images of floating in a warm liquid—but Ada had wept when Hannah had raised her hand and waved in that second before the faxportal whisked her away and out of sight. The ride back to Ardis Hall alone had simply deepened Ada’s anger at Odysseus, at Harman, and at men in general.
So Ada felt like anything but a loving disciple as she wandered up the hill behind Ardis Hall to listen to Odysseus’ lecture to the faithful and the curious.
The short, bearded man was dressed in his tunic and sandals, sword by his side, sitting against a fallen dead tree that Odysseus had cut down himself, while all around him and stretching down the hill toward the house sat and stood several hundred men and women. Several of the men were wearing tunics similar to Odysseus now, belted by the same kind of broad leather belt. Most seemed to be growing beards, which had not been in style in Ada’s lifetime.
Odysseus was answering questions at the moment. Ada knew that his usual schedule was to speak for about ninety minutes one hour after sunrise, then to go off by himself for hours, answer questions in the hour before lunch, speak again without interruption in the mid-afternoon, and entertain questions in the long twilight hour after the sun set. This was the pre-lunch gathering.
“Teacher, why must we find out who our fathers are? It’s never been important before.” It was a new young man who had held up his hand.
When Odysseus spoke, Ada had noticed over the past month, he usually held his hands straight out, thrusting his short, strong fingers at the air as if driving home the points of what he said. His arms and legs were tanned and powerful. For the first time, Ada noticed that some of the bearded men in the audience were also getting tanned and muscled. Odysseus had set up an obstacle course—all ropes and logs and muddy pits—in the forest up the hill, and demanded that anyone who listened to him more than twice must exercise at least an hour a day on the course. Many of the men—and some of the female disciples—had laughed at the idea the first time they tried it, but now they were spending long hours on the course, or running, each day. It made Ada wonder.
“If you don’t know your father,” Odysseus was answering in that low, calm, but fiercely firm voice of his that always seemed to carry as far as it had to, “how can you know yourself? I am Odysseus, son of Laertes. My father is a king, but also a man of the soil. When I saw him last, the old man was down on his knees in the dirt, planting a tree where an old giant of a tree had fallen—cut down by his hand finally—after being struck by lightning. If I do not know my father, and his father before him, and what these men were worth, what they lived for and were willing to die for, how can I know myself?”
“Tell us again about arete” came a voice from the front row. Ada recognized the man speaking as Petyr, one of the earliest visitors. Petyr was no boy—Ada thought he was in his fourth Twenty—but his beard was already almost as full as Odysseus’. Ada didn’t think the man had left Ardis since he’d first heard Odysseus speak that second or third day, when the visitors could be counted on two hands.
“Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things,” said Odysseus. “Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one’s life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.”
A newcomer ten rows up the hill, a heavyset man who reminded Ada a bit of Daeman, laughed and said, “How can you achieve excellence in all things, Teacher? Why would you want to? It sounds terribly tiring.” The heavy man looked around, sure of laughter, but the others on the hill looked at him silently and then turned back to Odysseus.
The Greek smiled easily—strong white teeth flashing against his tanned cheeks and short, gray beard—and said, “You can’t achieve excellence in all things, my friend, but you have to try. And how could you not want to?”
“But there are so many things to do,” laughed the heavy man. “One can’t practice for them all. One has to make choices and concentrate on the important things.” The man squeezed the young woman next to him, obviously his companion, and she laughed loudly, but she was the only one to laugh.
“Yes,” said Odysseus, “but you insult all those actions in which you do not honor arete. Eating? Eat as if it were your last meal. Prepare the food as if there were no more food! Sacrifices to the gods? You must make each sacrifice as if the lives of your family depended upon your energy and devotion and focus. Loving? Yes, love as if it were the most important thing in the world, but make it just one star in the constellation of excellence that is arete.”
“I don’t understand the agon, Odysseus,” said a young woman in the third row. Ada knew that her name was Peaen. She was intelligent, a skeptic of all things, but this was her fourth day here.
“The agon is simply the comparison of all like things, one to the other,” Odysseus said softly but clearly, “and the judgment of those things as equal to, greater than, or lesser than. All things in the universe take part in the dynamic of agon.” Odysseus pointed to the dead tree he was sitting on. “Was this tree greater than, lesser than, or simply equal to . . . that tree?” He pointed to a tall living tree up the hill, at the edge of the forest there. Voynix stood under the shadows of the branches. The voynix would not come close to Odysseus.
“That tree is living,” called the heavy man who had spoken earlier. “It must be superior to the dead tree.”
“Are all living things superior to all dead things?” asked Odysseus. “Many of you have gone under the turin cloth and seen the battle there. Is a dung merchant alive today a better man than Achilles was then, even if Achilles is dead now?”
“That’s comparing unlike things,” cried a woman.