The Megaron

The single largest room in the house, ringed with the great stone columns that hold the roof, a hearth in the middle big enough to roast an ox, weapons and shields hung on the walls in rows like memory. Tables run the length of the floor. This is where a king receives strangers, where a household eats, where bards play in the evenings and disputes are settled in the day. For twenty years it has been the suitors’ room. They sleep on its benches, throw bones to the dogs, spill wine on stone that has not been properly washed in months. The smell is meat and wine and something underneath, something rotten. [SPOILER: Telemachus quietly carries the spears and shields up to the storeroom under the cover of “the smoke is corroding the bronze.” The bow is brought in. The doors are locked. Antinous dies with a cup at his lips. The hall fills with bodies and the smell of copper and bile, and then with the bitter reek of sulfur as the servants try to scrub the stones clean. The blood comes out. The death does not. Even after the cleansing, the hall is changed: the very air remembers. Penelope sits on a stone bench at the far end and does not move toward the man at the other end until he names the bed.]