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.