Whispers of war first arrived when a foreign ship sailed into the harbor in the dusk of a humid Ithacan afternoon. From the courtyard of King Odysseus’ palace, where I had gone to fetch water with the other kitchen maids, I recognized a ship emblazoned with the red and gold of Sparta. The cooks called us back inside immediately, told us that Odysseus would host the sailors, and set us to work preparing for our guests. We scrubbed down the tables in the palace’s hall, butchered cattle, kneaded bread, and set out golden pitchers and basins to rinse the guests’ hands. We worked quickly; just after the sun had set, a large group of men, said to travel around trading slaves, entered the hall. Odysseus greeted them with laughter and embraced their captain, and Penelope told them of the feasting in store on their visit. Odysseus’ slaves brought our guests upstairs, where they bathed and dressed, and then the group, at least thirty men in total, descended the stairs. Sitting down around the tables of the great hall, they held out their goblets for filling and took up the pieces of meat served by attendants. As I stood along the wall, I could hear Odysseus and Penelope speaking and trading stories with the ship’s captain. While Odysseus began their discussion by complementing the build and quality of the Spartan ship and its crew, the conversation soon shifted to the goings-on of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. When asked of Menelaus, the captain raised an eyebrow and lifted the corner of his mouth in a smirk. Menelaus, he said, had fallen on trying times: his wife, Helen, had suddenly run away with a Trojan prince, leaving Menelaus in a rage, and the Trojans had refused to return her. At this news, Penelope rolled her eyes and glanced at Odysseus. As the sailors around him continued to swig wine, filling the hall with shouts of laughter, Odysseus stared down at his plate. His cheeks turned pallid, his lips pursed, and he said nothing. The captain continued to recount stories of Helen’s indiscretions, but Penelope, staring at Odysseus with widened eyes, swiftly turned to their guest. Stopping his story mid-sentence, she clasped his hand, laughed, and waved over an attendant to pour more wine.
Stylistic Choices: In “(Beware of) Guests Who Come Bearing News," I described the day on which my story transpired as “a humid Ithacan afternoon” because I wanted to establish that the day appeared to be ordinary, and that the narrator had grown up or become accustomed to life in Ithaca. My narration of the sailors’s arrival, and the preparation for the feast, was somewhat general, distant, and not intensely detailed, because I hoped to indicate that the progression of events, at that point, did not seem strange or unusual. As soon as the captain mentions war, the narrator begins to recall facial expressions and other micro-details, and I included this shift to convey that the conversation was startling and disconcerting, and caught the narrator’s attention immediately, making her more aware of body language.
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