Zhihui Zou

Ball and Chain

Padel’s spine hurt, and each time he bent down to pick the weeds from the golden wheat, he felt as if someone was twisting his waist like wringing out water from a piece of cloth. He only had a tree branch to help him loosen the soil around the weed so he could remove the roots as well to prevent them from growing back, but, in return, dirt filled the space below his fingernails and fragments of short stones cut his palms.

He straightened his back, rested his hands on his hips, and threw back his head, hoping a bit of stretching could relieve the discomfort. He was only a teenager, but back and knee problems had already began to show up.

The blazing sun made him shut his eyes as he rubbed his back. Sweat drifted down from his face, shiny under light because of being exposed under the sun for too long.

“Keep going! We might get this row done before sunset so we can work less tomorrow,” Padel’s sister, Blanchet, who was about five years older than him, called from not too far away, wearing the same tattered clothes and bending down every step to clean the weeds.

Padel looked around him where countless rows of wheat swayed in the breeze like a golden ocean.

He grunted and wiped his face with his dirty fur before continuing.

The sky above him looked as blue as the stream water in the forest, and the majestic curve of the mountains around him was a giant napping in the distance. Two birds chirped happily above him, flying together until they faded into the dark green background of the vast forest.

The work ended only when dusk arrived, and the twenty or so villagers dragged their tired legs back toward the foot of a hill, where around two dozen small houses and shacks were waiting for them. In a small open space in the middle of all the houses, a thin stream of smoke ascended.

“We might need some more people tomorrow to finish things before the end of the season,” Cabadero, a spear-thrower and a farmer combined into one, said to other villagers gathered around the bonfire.

“Candice and her family are still weak and coughing all the time,” Niomi, one of the most respected women in the village, replied. Other women, some about Blanchet’s age, some holding their babies, and a few old ones, gathered around behind her. “Not sure what got them into this, probably something they’ve eaten, but Burgeon is starting to cough too.”

“What about the mothers?”

“They still need to take care of the children.”

“But we can feed them…” Cabadero paused, rubbing his dusty chin as he remembered how a few years ago the newborns became weak after feeding them porridge just so their mothers could join the farm work sooner. “Right, right.”

The sound of rocks clattering against each other came from a nearby house followed by a yell: “Don’t mess around in here, you little devils!”

Cabadero raised his eyebrow, “Ulgthorn didn’t get to make any tools, right?”

“With the children running around…” Niomi then spread her hands.

Around the bonfire, the villagers talked and gossiped. One old man sat on the ground, drawing something with charcoal on a piece of flat stone with a few children huddling around, slapping at each other, saying things like “don’t forget the tail” or “make its legs look like ours” to the old man.

The teens, meanwhile, only gathered with others in their own gender. The boys were practicing their spear-throwing techniques, and, at the same time, peeking at the girls, who stood together, talking about how to make the best-looking braid while peeking back at the boys. 

The adults didn’t look so happy. They rarely looked happy.

Some of them would stand before their granary, looking at the harvest of last season while mumbling at each other:

“What if next season is bad?”

“I guess we can get through.”

“But it’s possible that the rest of the year would be bad, and then we’ll starve in the winter. We need to grow three more rows of wheat.”

“That means we’ll need to occasionally work till night.”

“But we could have enough food for everyone if the rest of the year is bad.”

“... right. Let’s do it then.”

When the shepherds came back with the sheep flock, it was as if a white cloud had descended upon them. The giant white cloud moved slowly with the shepherds, Bertini and Balbo, shouting uselessly at them to move faster.

They had killed and ate all the too strong, too curious, and too weak sheep first, hoping that the rest of the flock would be more submissive. It worked, but as the flock got bigger, the two shepherds’ job was similar to catching a bird while only blocking one of its ways.

“We might want a larger flock,” one of the adults said to the two.

“Sure, not like our job isn’t very hard,” Balbo mumbled as he scratched his long hair.

The adult sighed before explaining, “so that next year, when we have more children, we can feed all the people.”

“Why can’t we just have less children? And we have enough sheep to feed twenty more children,” Bertini grumbled as he raised his hand that held a wooden stick. He had just turned into an adult the previous season, and he sometimes envied the others who could stay on the farmland and not have to babysit fifty sheep.

“We need more hands to work the crops and more men to protect the land, and what if there’s something that makes the sheep sick?” another adult pointed out. “There’s no going backwards in life. You want to start hunting and gathering food?”

Bertini just shook his head and shooed the sheep into the pen.

<>

The next day, Padel and about half of the village returned to the field, removing weeds with their fingers, throwing away pebbles and large rocks the wheats didn’t like, and carrying water buckets to treat their thirsty, dropping ears until the villagers’ backs started to ache and their legs sored. Each time they straightened their backs to stretch or wipe the sweat off of their foreheads, they would glimpse at their half-empty granary and immediately resume their work with gritted teeth.

The other half of the tribe were either helping Bertini and Balbo with chasing back runaway sheep or cutting meat into small pieces and hanging them beneath the eaves to dry so they could store them longer. Except for the children, everyone was working. A lot of them had taken off their fur. A lot of them would rather wrap much thinner fur stripes around their waists and chests and let the sun scorch their exposed shoulders and arms than dirty their furs with sleeves used to defend against the cold night.

When the sun was directly above them, making the horizon sizzle like meat baking on the bonfire, a few figures appeared in the distance, closing in toward them.

Niomi raised her hand and blocked out the sun so she could get a clearer look, and her pupils narrowed.

“Invaders!” she yelled.

“Those Whiteheads,” Cabadero growled after recognizing the white points of their spears.

They called the villagers living about two hills away Whiteheads because of their signature move of painting their spearheads into white. They had slightly less members than Cabadero’s, but were known for hunting down elephants and wrestling wolves.

“Why are they here?” A younger girl asked, a faint sign of baby fat still on her face.

“They want our land, sweetie,” a woman replied, patting her head gently but with a worried look.

Some villagers ran out from houses, carrying their own spears and handing the extra ones to Padel, Cabadero, and the ones working in the field. They always had fights with the Whiteheads, hoping to take over one another’s farming land. Ulgthorn also came out with an armful of some thick vines with a stone wrapped around each end.

“What are you doing?” Niomi interrogated after receiving her spear.

“Something I created,” Ulgthorn replied, untangling the big mess of stones and vines. “You throw it at one of them, and the two stones on each end of the vine will wrap around them.”

“You sure this will work?” Padel asked with one eyebrow raised as he picked up one of them. “Looks like one of those toys I had. I think they’re called bolas.”

“Yes! These are like some jumbo size of those bola toys!”

“But we used those to throw at each other for fun. They don’t even hurt.”

“You just throw it at their legs, and the vines will wrap around their legs so they can’t move.”

The villagers exchanged questioning looks.

“Right, let’s see how it works.” One of them shrugged and picked up one for herself.

The “jumbo bolas” did work. Each time when one wrapped itself tightly around the legs of a Whitehead, he would immediately lose balance and fall face first to the ground.

The rest of the invaders quickly fled away.

“We need some people to gather more of these vines and stones and make more of these,” Cabadero suggested. “We might want more of these large bolas during the next battle.”

A few men and women nodded as they set off toward the woods.

“I think we might also need to build a fence or markings around our land,” someone else pointed out. “So we might look more powerful. Some of them ran away looking pretty scared.”

“We could carve a lion head on a stick and place them around, and they’ll probably be scared away next time,” Blanchet added.

A few mumbled in agreement.

“Around the entire land? That would be… I don’t know, at least a thousand sticks,” Padel said.

“But if we work all day and cooperate, we might finish it in two days, and we won’t be worrying about fighting them for the rest of our lives,” Cabadero insisted.

They all nodded and said that they would work on the markings together.

<>

It took more than two days, since no one could leave their original farming or shepherding position to work on the markings. So, at night, when they used to gather around the bonfire, tear off baked goat meat from rib bones, and joke about who could run the fastest, they searched the forest for the right tree branch and ripped off the bark. Most of them had to learn how to carve first, so the elders had to stay up all night as well to teach them.

“Looking sharp,” a woman complimented as the village looked at their barricade of lion carvings, smiling and nodding and patting everyone on the back.

“How are the bolas doing?” One asked, looking at Ulgthorn.

“We have enough to wrap five around every villager in this area…” Ulgthorn paused. He then ran down to his workshop and came back with something that looked like a spear, but instead with a pointy stone on the end, the stone a flat triangle. “I made this a few days ago. I call it a hoe.”

The villagers looked at it. A few widened their eyes while some just rested their hands on their hips.

“So we don’t have to loosen the soil, bend down, and dig up the weed every time. You just dig this into the ground around the weed and hoe the whole thing up,” Ulgthorn explained with a smirk. Then he paused after seeing the villagers not changing their facial expressions. “It can clear the small rocks around too. It just… makes you work faster. That’s all.”

After he walked to the edge of the wheat land and demonstrated, everyone smiled.

“That’s much faster!” One exclaimed.

“Well, I guess we now need more bolas and more hoes,” another one added.

<>

With Ulgthorn’s hoe, they removed the weeds and rocks of ten rows of wheat at noon, which, before, ten rows would’ve taken an entire day.

“We could grow more wheat from now on,” Niomi said while they gathered beneath a large tree to hide from noon’s blazing sun.

“Why? We can finally get some time to rest!” Padel replied, leaning against the tree trunk and stretching out his legs, Blanchet sitting next to him with her back straight and legs crossed.

“We need our village to grow, otherwise if there’s another village showing up with more people, they’ll defeat us and take away our land,” Niomi explained.

“We have the lion markings.”

“There’s always going to be someone who’s not afraid of lions,” Blanchet spoke up. “So we need to keep developing so others can’t get to us. We’ve got the jumbo bolas, and now the Whiteheads only dare to come to us at night.”

“Then we don’t fight each other!” Padel exclaimed. “We can just have each village minding their own business!”

“Yeah, say that to the Whiteheads and other villages,” Niomi scoffed, gesturing carelessly to the mountains.

“Bola practice tonight, and tomorrow we grow five more rows of wheat,” Cabadero announced. “And let’s see if we can find a way to dig a small canal to guide the river here so we don’t have to go all the way to get water.”

“Cab is the way,” a villager joked.

“You stop practicing, you lose,” Cabadero added.

“Then let’s convince everyone to stop.” Padel spread his hands. “Digging a canal will take much more work.”

“Then when you go up to the Whiteheads, before you could say a word, they would crack your head open,” Cabadero replied.

That night, when almost the entire village was practicing jumbo bola-throwing techniques next to the bonfire, Padel walked away from the group and wandered down toward the wheat.

Under the moonlight, the golden ocean looked just the same as the weeds and grassland in the distance. Ears of the wheat the height of his waist tickled his palm as he ran his fingers through them. Some leaves rustled in the background as a squirrel jumped from one branch to another.

As he looked back toward the village square, he could see his sister standing with a few other older girls of the village, talking and laughing as they watched the men and women using an old sheep as their jumbo bola target for practice.

Padel turned back as he continued his walk along the lion markings. The farther he walked into the darkness, the lonelier he felt. When he reached the farther tip of their rectangular farming land, the bonfire was a small, thin red line flashing in the distance.

A dark figure dashed across from him with another dark figure in close pursuit. Padel couldn’t see their faces with the faint moonlight, but recognized the outline of a deer’s antler and the slim back of a lion.

He quickly took a few steps back and held on to one of the wooden sticks with a lion carving. He wasn’t really scared of lions. No one was afraid of those beasts actually, but he was alone out here, with no support and no spear.

The thin stick with the lion carving suddenly felt so weak in his hand.

The deer zigzagged this way and that, making the lion once almost run into a tree. Padel could hear the faint but rapid footsteps thudding against the earth, as quick as the heartbeat of a kid who had just played catch with his friends.

As the distance between the lion and the deer increased, Padel thought the deer might escape this time, but as a third figure unleashed itself, the deer fell to the ground, kicking its legs and struggling frantically. In the end, the deer stilled.

A second lion had been hiding in the tall grass. No wonder the first lion didn’t look so agitated when its prey was about to escape.

Padel was familiar with the lions’ hunting strategy, but the deer clearly wasn’t.

Before the two could indulge their dinner, they turned to Padel and moved closer.

Padel’s body froze.

At that moment, a loud cheer erupted from the village. Probably someone had tackled a running sheep with a jumbo bola. The noise got the attention of the lions. They looked at the village and paused their steps.

For a brief moment, the lions stared at the village, and Padel stared at the lions. None of them moved; none of them made a sound. Padel’s eyes widened and his chest heaved while the lions just blinked slowly and turned back to the deer.

Before falling asleep that night, the two lions’ faces still flashed before Padel’s eyes. They didn’t look hungry, and they weren’t faces of anger. They looked… envious, like a boy seeing another boy walking hand-in-hand with his crush.

<>

In the morning, after watering the crops with the village, Padel walked away from the field and headed back toward the houses.

“Hey! Where are you going? We need to grow a few more rows of wheat!” Blanchet called out while everyone turned and watched the two.

“We don’t need to. We have enough to feed ourselves,” Padel replied without looking back.

“I thought we explained everything yesterday.”

Padel remained silent as he dropped the water bucket in the tool shack, grabbed his fur from his house, and headed into the forest with his spear.

“He doesn’t know what he’s missing,” someone said as they focused back on the field.

The forest used to be Padel’s playground. He still remembered the time when he, Blanchet, and a few other kids journeyed among the trees every day, picking berries and throwing rocks at squirrels until sunset. They got to know every tree, every branch, every leaf, and every animal, but after they reached ten years old, the village wanted him to work in the field.

When he first joined the adults, they only had about five short rows of wheat, and almost every two or three days needed to kill a sheep for meat.

Padel was fine with that. The granary still had food and the flock size was still stable. But one day, when one of them said “what if the next season is a bad season” and got everyone panicking, the wheat field started growing and the village started working extra hours carrying water from the river and clearing weeds and picking rocks under the sun instead of having fun in the forest.

The trees looked strange to Padel as he stepped into the forest. The markings they’d drawn for fun on barks back then were gone, and new leaves had replaced the old ones they’d used to make leaf-bombs as children.

He stopped beneath one particularly tall tree, looked up, and strained his eyes to find the shape of the crown. It was so high it seemed to reach the clouds.

It was the tree that, before the village wanted him to work in the field, he and Blanchet had hoped to build a house on one day and call it their “tree house”. But when they’d finally found the way to climb the tree and find a sturdy branch as the base, instead of giving them encouragement, the adults had pointed them toward the wheat field.

The adults had also said that when the farm work was light and the village’s size was big enough, they would all help to build it. Yet they’d never given Padel an explanation of when exactly farming was “light” and how big of a village counted as “big enough.”

<>

When winter was over, the village had only eaten half of the food tin the granary.

“Aren’t you going to help us today? It’s spring,” Cabadero asked when seeing Padel walking back into the forest after lunch. They had watered the wheat and cleared out the newly grown weeds in the morning, and they planned to expand the field a bit again due to the seven babies born during winter.

“We have enough food, you know. We don’t need another five rows of wheat,” Padel objected without looking back.

“The village is growing, and we can’t let ten people starve so the rest could live like you.”

“How do I live?” Pedal raised an eyebrow.

“You just eat and don’t work.”

“I do work. But I won’t help with unnecessary work!”

“Our village is one big family, and we don’t let any one of us star…”

“Just have less babies and worry less about the bad seasons. Problem solved.”

Cabadero opened his mouth and tried to yell something, but nothing came out. He threw his hands in the air with frustration before joining the rest of the village in the field.

The words got around before sundown, and during dinner, all of the one hundred and fifty villagers were talking about Padel.

“How come he’s this immature?” The adults said to each other. “Does he not know that we need to feed the babies?”

“And he’s constantly going into the forest and wandering around and climbing trees like an idiot,” a woman added.

“He can’t expect to eat and not work,” someone else pointed out.

“Maybe I should talk to him tomorrow,” one man announced after tearing off the meat from the sheep’s rib bone.

“I’ll bash him if he doesn’t listen!” a much larger man jumped to his feet and shouted. “He just sat there and watched at the mountains the whole winter and didn’t help us make more spears and carve more field markings.”

“He’s just a lazy dog!”

“He’s more of a traitor!”

“He did gather some sticks for Ulgthorn to make more hoes,” Blanchet suggested carefully while sitting in the corner. As the closest person to Padel, she didn’t escape some cold-shoulders from other villagers.

“Those were only enough to make fifty spears!” an old man fired back. “Don’t you forget that the Whiteheads are still out there.”

“But we have the jumbo bola…” Blanchet’s voice had turned into a hum.

“We can’t depend on one weapon! Don’t you know some basic rules in a battle?” Yet another villager accused.

The children only knew the things that the adults had told them, so when Padel came close to them, they threw sticks and pebbles at him and shouted things like:

“You’re not a team worker!”

“Selfish!”

“You rascal!”

<>

The next day passed by in the same fashion: Padel working with the village in the field until they’d tended all their original wheat field but refusing to work the new ones.

“The village needs to stick together. You can’t just hope you can live on your own,” Blanchet said to him that night, when the rest of the village gathered around the bonfire. The two siblings stood under the eave of their house, staring at the dark trees.

“They’re going the wrong way,” Padel replied confidently. “They’re like… like eating food but not knowing how full they are, and one day, their stomachs will simply explode when they’ve eaten too much.”

“No, their stomachs won’t explode, because the village is growing and there are more people who need to eat.”

“That is just an excuse to do extra work. I mean… we won’t get five bad seasons in a row…all the wheat won’t die tomorrow. That’s just ridiculous.”

“Who would make excuses so they could work more?” Blanchet chuckled.

Padel scratched his head to construct a response, but he failed.

During the silence, a bird glided over their heads, chirped happily while circling a few times, and disappeared into the distance. Padel stretched his neck and squinted his eyes, trying to get just one more glimpse of the creature.

“Why can’t we live like birds or squirrels?” he said finally. “So we don’t need to worry about farming and fighting the Whiteheads or…worry about things we don’t even need to worry about.”

“Then you’ll be going to sleep every day without knowing whether you’ll have breakfast when waking up,” Blanchet replied with a shrug.

“Then I could hunt for worms or find tree nuts.”

“You just wish that you’ll find some, and you might be lucky and find a few. But if you don’t, then you starve. At least here, we can be prepared for those times.”

“I just think it’s not worth it.”

“How’s it not? You grow more food, you get more people, and the village gets stronger and bigger.”

“But what if I don’t want my village to be big and strong… what if I just want to live like we already are so that…I can just do whatever I want every day?”

“Are you going to find food then?”

“Of course. I know I need to eat, but I won’t need to find food for the entire next year, right?”

<>

The next afternoon, Padel went out far into the grassland. From the wheat field, Padel’s figure was small and finger-sized to the villagers.

Padel only carried a spear. Not one of the large ones Ulgthorn had created a few months ago, but the short one he used to hunt ducks when he was a kid.

“What is he doing this time?” Niomi sniggered when she raised her head from the wheat.

“Probably trying to talk to animals or something,” someone laughed without looking.

Meanwhile Padel was staring at a deer with light brown fur dotted with black patterns. Her neck was white and her two large eyes reflected Padel’s face.

Each time he took a small step closer, the deer would step back a bit. After a few more steps, the deer slightly bent her legs as if she’d run away if Padel chose to come any further.

“Hey, hey, I’m not going to eat you,” he whispered.

He tossed away his spear. The deer’s eyes followed the flying object, and Padel was sure he had seen a glimpse of joy on her face as her bent legs relaxed and straightened while her eyelids dropped a bit, no longer constantly looking out for danger.

Padel smiled. He rubbed his hands on his fur jacket nervously. The last time he’d interacted with a deer this closely was years ago. When he was young, he and Blanchet would sneak out of the village and into the wild. If they were lucky, a friendly deer would allow them to touch its fur.

Padel slowly moved forward, raising his feet and putting it down before him like a sloth. A breeze passed by, leaning the tips of his hair and the deer’s fur toward the hills.

He smiled when the deer still stood there when he could almost reach out and touch her, but as soon as he raised his arm, the beautiful creature dashed away.

“It won’t work. You two don’t live in the same world,” Blanchet said from behind as she walked toward him.

Padel’s body jerked at the sudden appearance of his older sister, but he quickly calmed down. He sighed, straightening his back and turning his head until his neck crackled.

“Look at the bright side! You have a big family and you have food,” Blanchet continued, walking closer to her younger brother. She didn’t need to worry about him running away because of fear.

“Then which world do we live in?” Padel asked.

“Our world.”

“What’s our world?”

Blanchet thought about it for a while, resting her hands on her hips and biting her lower lip.

“Come with me,” she said at last and strode toward the hills.

“Hey, where are you going?” Padel raised his hands and called.

“Just come with me!” Blanchet commanded.

Padel hesitated before catching up with his sister.

The hills looked within reach, but after Padel’s throat dried and his legs became sore, the dark green bumps looked just as far as when they had started the march. Blanchet’s eyes focused before her while Padel looked around all the time. They couldn’t see one deer, lion, hyena, or bird, only endless dry grass and lonely trees.

“Hold on, isn’t that toward the…” Padel said. The hill they headed toward looked strangely familiar.

“Yes, the Whiteheads.” Blanchet nodded, not looking back at her brother.

“Are you crazy? Just the two of us?”

“Quit whining. I know a safe route on the other side of the hill.”

“How do you know it’s safe?”

“I’ve tested it at night, multiple times. It’s perfectly safe.”

“So that’s why you've kept going out at night?”

“What do you expect?”

“I thought you were… you know… ” Padel hesitated. “With a boy or something.”

Blanchet rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay, I was joking, all right?” Padel had to run to catch up with her. “But it’s really not safe to go anywhere near the Whiteheads.”

“We’ll just be looking from the hilltop. I have something to show you there.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t ask questions.”

Even though the hill wasn’t that high, Blanchet chose the steepest slope, guarded by boulders and trees with trunks as thick as three sheep combined. Sunlight lucky to penetrate through the thick branches and leaves sometimes only resulted in leaving a few thin light beams floating in the air.

They were both sweating in their furs during the climb. Blanchet reached the top first, and her long hair was plastered against her neck as she plopped down behind a boulder, panting heavily.

“Can we go a bit slower?” Padel complained as he dragged himself up the slope.

“No, because we still need to go back in time to help with the field work.”

Padel grunted as he straightened his back and stretched, taking in deep breaths to feed his burning lungs.

But before he could take in one breath, Blanchet grabbed his ankle and pulled him down. Padel felt as if someone had jabbed him in the chest when he thunked face-down on the ground and forced all of the air out of his lungs.

“You idiot!” Blanchet hissed beside his ears. “That’s why you need to live in a village and take care of your people so there’s someone to stop you when you’re being stupid!”

“Hey! What’s wrong with taking some…”

“You think the Whiteheads are blind?” Blanchet tried to keep her voice as low but also as authoritative as possible. “They might see you.”

That convinced Padel. After lying behind the boulder for a full minute, Padel slowly stuck out his head, like a hare peeking out from its hole, and looked down.

Beneath them, about two dozen Whiteheads wandered from house to house, sometimes stopping and saying something to one another. Some gathered near the entrance of the village, throwing rocks at a small animal. The fire pit among the houses only had a small pile of black ash instead of having a tower of brown wood, like the one back in Padel’s village.

“They have less houses,” Padel said.

“Those can’t be counted as houses,” Blanchet mumbled.

Padel narrowed his eyes to get a clearer view. She was right. Some houses were just shacks, and a few didn’t even have walls, just a leaf-made roof held up by four logs. And the logs still had barks or thin branches attached to them, which would never happen in his village.

Most people in his village, especially Cabadero and Niomi, would shed the wood they’d collected until the surface was smooth and light brown before using them. Their reason was that a rough wood surface would increase the possibility of getting scratches and injuries when walking around in the village.

Back then, Padel thought it was just nonsense. He had run into trees multiple times and gotten no serious injuries. He didn’t understand why some people would endure swollen hands and bleeding fingers just to pick off the bark.

But from the hilltop, those crude woods even seemed a bit too wild and uncivilized, as if he was watching a group of wild monkeys who only knew how to giggle and throw pebbles at each other.

“Look at their field too,” Blanchet whispered.

Padel turned toward the Whiteheads’ wheat field.

He knew that almost all villages grew wheat, but the Whiteheads’ field looked smaller and less golden than his village’s. The kernels of the wheat looked a bit thinner and the ears dangled like the arms of a sick man. Padel knew that the wheat field of a village was what determined the strength of the village, the larger and denser the better.

The emptiness of the field was what stunned Padel the most. He knew that, right now, the wheat field of his village would be flooded by people cleaning the weeds and carrying water buckets.

“That’s why they want to fight other villages all the time,” Blanchet said at last. “They want to hunt for their food instead of grow their own.”

“But they haven’t shown up for the past few months,” Padel pointed out.

“That’s because we changed. We got more people to farm and more people to make the village stronger. And,” Blanchet pointed at the Whiteheads. “They have the same number of people like last year, and the year before, because they can’t hunt the extra food to feed extra members.”

Padel remained quiet. When he was young, the Whiteheads were devils and ghosts to him and other children. Each time they had wandered too far from the village or played in the forest until after sunset, the adults would say things like:

“Are you letting the Whiteheads get to you?”

“If you go out too far, the Whiteheads will sneak up on you and eat off your head!”

“Play too late, Whiteheads came.”

But they didn’t look so tough now.

“We don’t need everyone to work hard. If there’s one person working hard, everyone would. No one wants to be the dinner,” Blanchet added with a much milder tone.

Padel watched the careless Whiteheads roaming around like flies. He could even hear one man’s loud laughter. He scratched his head, recalling a few years ago when he couldn’t go to sleep without Blanchet holding him because that day, an adult had told him that “Whiteheads sometimes come at night!”

Even after he grew up and was old enough to participate in fights against the Whiteheads, Padel only threw stones at them from far away while watching Cabadero, Niomi, Ulgthorn, and other villagers spear fighting the Whiteheads or punching them in the stomachs.

Now, seeing his childhood monster living like scavengers beneath him, a wave of nostalgia or even sympathy struck him. 

“Let’s go,” Blanchet said as she tried to climb back down the hill.

Padel sighed before he followed, but when he looked out into the horizon, a swarm of dark dots moved toward them like a large flock of black sheep.

“What’s that?” Padel asked.

“Deers probably,” Blanchet replied without looking.

“No, they look like…” Padel squinted his eyes. “They look like… people.”

“People?” Blanchet exclaimed as she moved back to her brother. Forgetting about the Whiteheads, she stood up to get a clearer view.

The dark dots moved toward them, fast. They were men riding on horses accompanied by a few on foot. In just a minute, Padel and Blanchet recognized their heads and legs and hands carrying something that reflected sunlight. It looked like a long piece of shiny stone. The thing they wore on their heads covered most of their chin and extended down around their necks like a peacock’s tail. Two lions were resting near a bush, and when the men woke them, instead of rushing toward the fangless and clawless humans, the two walked away after seeing the long, shiny, stone-like weapons.

The Whiteheads noticed the incoming too. They jumped to their feet and rushed for their spears. But before the shiny weapons and men straddling on horses, those spears that had starred in Padel’s many nightmares turned into the soft toes of a lamb.

When the Whiteheads lined up before their village, the incoming storm of men didn’t stop. Padel could hear the leader of the Whiteheads shouting something to his men as they roared and rushed at the invaders.

But the invaders marched on. Watching the Whiteheads rush toward them, they swung their weapons, and after a few bright flashes of sunlight, all the Whiteheads dropped lifelessly to the ground before they could touch one of the invaders.

“That can’t be…” Blanchet murmured with wide eyes. “What are they using?”

After recognizing movements, one of the men looked up at the hill. He then pointed his shiny weapon at the two siblings.

Padel and Blanchet told their villagers to run, but no one listened. They all thought they could defeat the invaders as easy as how they had kept the Whiteheads at bay for seasons. So the two fled. When they found a large tree and hid behind its thick trunk, they looked back and saw the men standing around their village’s fire pit. Now, Padel and Blanchet could see that the invaders wore thick, shiny armors just like their weapons. The two siblings had never seen something like that, as if the men had come from the moon. Surrounding the men were the bodies of their villagers, holding childish-looking bolas and wooden spears.