The Battle

Odysseus stands in the middle of the hall with the bow drawn, the string tight against his jaw. Arrows are faster than panic. Antinous is still reaching for his cup when the arrow takes him in the throat. He makes no sound. He dies the way men die when death comes before the body understands it's been struck. The next arrow is already flying, then the next. The suitors scatter like animals that sense the predator but don't yet know where to run.

"Doors locked!" Telemachus shouts. Eumaeus and Philoetius are already moving, moving with the violence of men who have nothing left to lose. They take up spears from the racks on the wall. Odysseus's arrows continue falling; each one finds a man, each man falling without time to call out. Some try to rush the door; they die before they reach it.

Then the spears. Telemachus drives his into a suitor's chest, the man's eyes go wide and wet, and pulls it free to strike again. There is no mercy in the boy now. Twenty years of suitors in his house, eating his inheritance, mocking his mother, and now they fall one after another, their hands reaching for weapons they never have time to draw. Eumaeus moves like he was made for this. Philoetius too. Two against many. But the many are unarmed and already dying.

The swords come last. Odysseus drops the bow and picks up a spear, then a blade, and wades into the bodies already fallen. What's left of the suitors, the ones fast enough or lucky enough to still be breathing, come at him with whatever they can seize. A table leg. A wine jug. They die trying. He is simply the next thing that happens, and they are the thing that ends.

Blood pools on the tile. The smell rises: copper, bile, the sharp stink of fear. Bodies pile against the walls and in doorways. By the end there are so many dead that the living have to step over them. By the end it's quiet.