The Competition - Constrained Writing Contest #16
This is my entry for the Constrained Writing Contest #16 which is organized by @svashta
The Competition
There was dead silence.
The warriors clenched knives and spoons behind their backs, eyes fastened on the amount of food rising on the huge platters in front of them as they plotted the best mode of attack. None of them had known what the platters would contain, apart from what would be coming from their own villages.
Everybody in the crowd watched keenly as the different chiefs' cooks filled the platters. Each chef placed an equal amount of his or her particular dishes on each plate. Then the warriors drew lots to decide places.
The first drum signal rang out. Each warrior briefly raised his platter to the sky. A second drum roll and the competition began.
Knives and spoons lay abandoned on the tables as their owners used hand and teeth to shovel food into their mouths. They started the same way, swallowing a mouthful of each type of food on their platters. They had to taste all the foods prepared by all the villages in order to have a chance of winning. Then they started demolishing the mounds according to their strengths, tastes and plans. There were meat, vegetable and grain offerings as well as fruit and three calabashes of potent coconut wine per contestant.
The villagers shouted and sang encouragement to their respective champions.
Three minutes later the drum spoke again. Odhis, the warrior from Plantain village, had emptied his platter and calabashes. It was a new record. He's nearest rival's platter still had half of the food on it.
The chief of Plaintain, Langa, stood and bowed as the other chiefs brought prime seedlings of their villages specialties and laid them before him. It was a sign of each villages's commitment to the era of peace, where no village manufactured weapons of destruction or attacked another. As each chief showed off what his home area could produce, residents from all the villages clapped and cheered.
Thanks to this annual competition, the peace had lasted five ears. Nowadays the villages challenged each other with the size of their harvests and the number of people they fed instead of the number of heads they had cut off.
As champion, Odhis would receive a quarter of the seedlings for his own use. The rest would be shared equally between the other residents of Plantain.
It was a good time to be alive.
Your story was an amazing read and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Very well written and also a very nice change that they stopped cutting heads off of people! :D
Although, I fail to see how your story either starts sad and ends happy or starts happy and ends sad... Apart from the shift to a competition instead of killing - I also see no sign of an existential question... :/
Nevertheless, the story was an amazing read and I am happy you have decided to participate in the contest! :D
Thank you very much for your entry! :D
Oh, and...
I want some of that, please! :D
Kind words, indeed. Thank you.
About the sad-to- happy slide and the existential question - I think I stretched possibility a bit too far it couldn't be traced. D
I liked it!
By the way, you might be interested in a similar story by Keiichi Sigsawa in Kino's Journey, The Beautiful World, 2000, v. 1.
Two nations have made peace with each other by organizing a friendly competition, after a hundred years of ever more deadly warfare. People happily prepare for "war" each year, which now means the competition.
What's the competition? That's where the story turns rather dark. They have advanced technology. They fly over to a third country with primitive technology, and start bombarding the buildings and dropping anything that moves, until the time limit. Then neutral judges count the bodies of the dead. Whichever country has produced the most bodies "wins" the "war" . . . and hosts a festival. The bodies are meanwhile strewn outside the city wall.
The people of the two countries seem to think this is better than having their own war, because, when they fought in the past, many on each side died in that conflict. Now, none, meanwhile those in the third country cannot resist the invaders. The narrator, being only one person, observing it, can't do anthing to stop it.
Thank you for telling me about Kino's Journey.
That story is dark and speaks very honestly about human nature. . A war doesn't seem to be a war as long as there are no casualties on the winner's side. The losers don't count . And the exporting these competitions to vulnerable areas has been done so many times in history.
A terrible truth.