Monkey Wars

by Richard Kurti

  “What’s wrong?”

  Fig shook her head. “I just came to groom you.”

  Papina couldn’t hide her astonishment—all those moons of silence broken by such a mundane comment.

  Fig started to back away. “I’m sorry—”

  “No!” Papina reached out and grabbed her arm. “Please…that would be nice.” She smiled, turned her back and rippled her shoulders, inviting grooming fingers to get to work. “Dig away.”

  Fig shuffled closer, reached out her hands…and hesitated. She had been locked inside her own grief for so long she felt like a prisoner staggering out into the light, unsure of her footing.

  “There’s a flea in there that’s been giving me trouble all day,” Papina said, trying to make it easier. “Feels like a juicy one.”

  Fig gave a wan smile. “How funny.” And her fingers started to comb through Papina’s fur.

  For a while neither said anything. There was no need to rush; grooming was all about sharing a space. Then, just as Fig started on Papina’s scalp, she said quietly, “I want to do my bit…in the fight.”

  Papina wanted to shout with joy, but wisely she decided to play it cool. “Well, we need all the help we can get. What were you thinking? Medical duties?”

  Fig stopped grooming. She stepped in front of Papina, looking at her with burning eyes.

  “There’s a black rage inside me. I have to do something with it or it’ll destroy me. I need revenge.”

  Papina could hardly believe this was Fig speaking—gentle, compassionate Fig, who never wanted to offend anyone.

  “I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” whispered Fig, as if any hint of weakness now had to be treated like a shameful secret.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for,” replied Papina. “Nothing.” And she opened her arms and hugged her.

  —

  Mico was nearly asleep when Papina dropped silently into the gloom of the water tower and lay next to him. She stroked the back of his head, observing the grooves her fingers carved in his fur. Mico felt a tingle of pleasure run down his spine.

  “Everything all right?” he whispered.

  “How did you know we wouldn’t tear you to pieces?”

  “What?”

  “When you walked back into our lives? How did you know we wouldn’t turn on you?”

  Mico shrugged. “If that’s really what the world had come to, then I’d be better off out of it.”

  Papina put her arms around Mico’s torso. “Fig’s come back to us.”

  Mico turned to face her, his eyes wide with surprise. “She wants to fight?”

  Papina smiled. “We’re all warriors now.”

  —

  Fig’s return lifted the whole troop, and inspired Gu-Nah and Mico to move their training to a whole new level.

  As infants, all monkeys were taught to stay well away from the tangle of power lines that ran across the city’s rooftops, where deadly electricity fizzed and crackled.

  “And that is precisely the point,” said Mico to the troop. “Because no one else goes there, we must.”

  “I thought the idea was to kill Tyrell, not ourselves,” said Twitcher testily; having seen Fig turn back to life, he didn’t want to lose her through recklessness.

  “There’s wires…and there’s wires,” said Gu-Nah cryptically. “While you’ve been enjoying your beauty sleep, we’ve been getting up early to find out the facts.”

  “You see, there are two types of wires up there,” continued Mico. “One is deadly; the other harmless. They’re all tangled up, but if we can learn to spot the difference, we’ll be able to use the wires to get right into the heart of Tyrell’s empire. All langur stay away from the overhead lines, even the elites. And if they ever followed us up there, they’d soon touch the wrong wires—”

  “And BOOM!” added Gu-Nah with dark relish.

  “You’ll have to relearn what it means to swing all over again,” said Mico. “You’re going to need accuracy, vision and balance beyond anything you ever thought possible. You’re going to need the guts to swing fast, high above the streets, with your fingers brushing past death time and again. Succeed at that, and you’ll achieve what no monkey has ever achieved: control of the air.”

  Rafa put her hand up tentatively. “If no one’s done it before, how did you learn?”

  Gu-Nah smiled. “We haven’t. Not yet.”

  —

  They rose at dawn each day to start their research, memorizing the different wire networks above the city. As the morning wore on and the langur patrols ramped up, the rhesus retreated to the safety of the steelworks, where Gu-Nah had built a special training course on the ground around the water tower, laying out a network of branches and interweaving them with some colored piping he’d found on a dump. The idea was to run across the carpet of branches while touching only the piping.

  At first it seemed impossible; no monkey was that agile. But as the days passed they started to get the hang of it.

  The trick was decisiveness—see the options, make your choice, then leap. As you got faster you had to speed up your thinking, until eventually you could surrender to the momentum, completely trusting your instincts, forgetting that one wrong footfall meant death.

  Once the monkeys had mastered the ground exercise, Gu-Nah moved it up into the trees. They would trek out to a small, neglected park where he had marked the trees with the dye from crushed flowers, indicating which branches were “safe” and which “deadly.”

  Here the rhesus spent day after day practicing high-speed swinging. The painful drop was the price of thinking too slowly.

  As Mico and Gu-Nah watched the monkeys become sharper and bolder, they thought of another use for these new skills: tram surfing.

  A network of trams rattled right through the langur empire. Fed via pantographs that skimmed along a power grid, the sparking electricity kept monkeys well away. But if they had the guts to negotiate the power lines and the skill to judge how to leap onto a moving tram, this would be a brilliant way to move around the city.

  Practice. As always, that was Gu-Nah’s prescription. It was just a question of putting in the hard work.

  They started by leaping off road bridges onto trucks that passed underneath. From trucks they moved to smaller targets to improve their accuracy, like cars.

  Gradually, and with many bruises, they started to master this new art. Training was not all about derring-do, though. The rhesus were peaceful monkeys by nature, and Mico worried that when the fighting actually started, when things got ugly and messy and painful, his troops would lose their resolve. To harden their determination, he created the “outsider ordeal.”

  The whole group was set a simple task: prepare a feast to mark the new moon. But secretly, they were also instructed to shun one designated monkey. After much thought, Mico decided the victim would be Cadby.

  Initially Cadby was puzzled why everyone ignored him; then, when he realized this must be some kind of exercise, he laughed it off.

  The laughter didn’t last long.

  Before they were even halfway through, he had turned moody and resentful; then he started lashing out, assaulting other monkeys to try and get some attention, but still they didn’t engage, they just turned their backs. It was as if Cadby didn’t exist, as if he had vanished.

  Frustrated and rejected, Cadby felt rage boiling up inside him; wanting to destroy what he couldn’t be part of, he started stockpiling weapons—rusty barbed wire, broken glass, iron bars—as if he was planning a murderous rampage.

  Mico looked on, alarmed. Even though all the monkeys could see how distressed Cadby was, none of them broke the rules, none of them protested that the exercise was too cruel. It was as if a sinister force had moved among them, binding them together, and the more ruthlessly they shunned Cadby, the more they seemed to bond.

  That was when Mico stopped the ordeal.

  The moment he spoke to Cadby, the spell was broken. The young monkey snapped to his senses and looke
d at the weapons in dismay. Cadby had been shaken to his core—he had glimpsed a terrifying darkness.

  Afterward they all gathered in a circle as Cadby told them about the fear he had felt, the sense of utter worthlessness.

  “And that’s exactly what Tyrell has done to us,” Mico said after Cadby had bared his soul. “He’s turned us all into outsiders. He’s built a world where we don’t exist. Which is why we have to destroy him.”

  Mico looked up at the sky, waiting for the monsoon.

  This was the most dangerous season for monkeys, when the rain pummeled down, wild and unpredictable, stinging like thorns; when food was hard to pilfer because market traders were driven from the streets; when storm gullies were monstrously transformed into raging torrents, hurtling unlucky monkeys to their deaths.

  No monkey ventured out in the monsoon unless it was essential, which was why Mico decided that it would be the perfect time to declare war on the langur. It was the very last thing they would be expecting, and it was why the final section of rhesus training was devoted to water war.

  They began in Kolkata’s famous Dancing Fountains. At dusk every evening, crowds of human children trooped to the park for a surreal nightly show: dramatic music thundered through the loudspeakers, banks of colored light burst into life as countless moving nozzles squirted torrents of water into the air in perfect sequence, painting fleeting pictures in the evening sky.

  Swinging deftly along the telegraph wires, the rhesus dropped down into the splash pools just before the show was about to start. They were not there to play or bathe, but to conquer their fear of water, to sit absolutely still as the sprays pounded them.

  The opening sequence of the show was quite restrained—alternating pulses of water shot up into the air, and as the patterns dissolved into rain the monkeys were soaked just like in a regular storm. But as the show progressed the high-pressure jets spun into action, creating elaborate concentric swirls, turning the splash pools into a raging confusion of painful spray.

  In the early days, this was the point when most of the monkeys dived out of the fountains. The water was just too fierce and frightening—it felt as if you were drowning.

  Fig was the first to conquer her fear, standing frozen like a statue as the water battered her from all directions, absorbing the pain without complaint.

  Seeing Fig’s resolve, Papina refused to be outdone, and where the females led, the males had to follow. Cadby put on a brave face and endured it even though he clearly hated every moment. But the biggest turnaround was with Joop and Rafa. At first they were terrified and had to be dragged into the splash pools, but once they realized that they could still breathe even though water was firing at them from all directions, they relaxed and started to enjoy the sheer anarchy of the experience.

  As the troop’s water confidence grew, Mico and Gu-Nah moved on to the Hooghly River.

  It was a huge step—the murky water of the great river was a world apart from the Dancing Fountains. Here they were confronted by frighteningly fast currents that whipped branches and debris past with unrelenting energy.

  “The trick is to remember that the currents may be strong, but they’ll pull you right across the city with very little effort. They’re your friends,” said Mico. “And who doesn’t want to have strong friends?”

  They started by rummaging among the flotsam in the mud and experimenting to see what floated, what sank, and which bits of debris were big enough to keep a monkey above the water.

  Clasping these improvised floats, they launched themselves into the Hooghly. Under no circumstances were they to paddle or swim; they had to let their floats do the work while they concentrated on feeling the river, steering by changing the position of their legs.

  With practice, fear turned into excitement—surrendering to a massive force while using ingenuity to surf it gave the monkeys a huge thrill. Within days, they were riding the river for the entire length of the curve that arced all the way from the Howrah Station Jetty to the Botanical Gardens.

  It meant the rhesus had mastery of land, air and water. Now all they had to do was watch the sky and wait for the rains to come.

  —

  Tyrell barely looked at the sky these days—the monsoon didn’t concern him. In fact, the routine business of ruling his empire no longer held the fascination it once did. Tyrell was now absorbed by only one thing: the great plan.

  This was his bid for immortality; driving humans out of their own city would mean that never again would humans anywhere treat monkeys as inferior.

  No effort was spared in visualizing the great plan. Sweto and Breri, now the most trusted of Tyrell’s inner circle, worked tirelessly in the rooms at the top of the summer house tower. Under the lord ruler’s direction, they recarved the wall map, flattening some areas, shaping new ones, creating a bold three-dimensional impression of what the city would look like after the great expulsion.

  What made Tyrell happy, though, made Hummingbird uneasy. When the Barbary had once asked how the humans were to be driven out, Tyrell flew into a rage, accusing him of disloyalty, implying that to harbor such doubts bordered on treason.

  So everyone stopped asking. But Hummingbird could see disaster looming, which is why one evening he secretly gathered all his troops on the canopy above the stage of Kolkata’s open-air theater.

  “We are Barbaries,” he declared. “We fight for hire. That’s why we came. And Tyrell rewarded us well. But Tyrell has lost his mind.”

  An uncomfortable murmur ran through the troops—such blunt speaking nearly always heralded a bitter fight.

  “His lust to fight the humans has blinded him. We must abandon Tyrell before his world collapses. Or we’ll be dragged down with him.”

  Disappointed silence. So it was all over. The Barbaries would have to move on, leave this life of ease and take their chances on the road once again.

  Then just as they started to disperse, a lone voice spoke up; not the laconic voice of a typical Barbary, but a smoother, more articulate one.

  “Perhaps there’s another way of looking at this,” said Oatsack.

  “My decision is made,” pronounced Hummingbird.

  “But,” Oatsack persisted, “surely the facts speak for themselves?” He stood up, determined to make his case. “We Barbaries have roamed far and wide, fought many battles for many leaders, but which of us has ever encountered a troop as powerful as these langur of Kolkata?”

  Oatsack let the question hang in the air for a few moments, but no one had an answer.

  “The fact is,” he continued, “Tyrell has built the greatest empire known to monkeykind, and it is frankly inconceivable that it will collapse.”

  “Everything crumbles!” boomed Hummingbird, infuriated by Oatsack’s oily rhetoric, which mimicked the tricksy manner of the langur. “Even things the humans build crumble. Remember the temples we saw in the jungles? Reduced to rubble and ruin!”

  “Tyrell’s point exactly,” persisted Oatsack. “If mere creepers can triumph over humans, why can’t monkeys?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Hummingbird, his patience wearing dangerously thin. “Because most langur don’t want to fight humans. They’re too frightened to say it, but look into their eyes. A rift has opened between Tyrell and his troop.”

  “Then we should step in and take the langur from him,” Oatsack retorted defiantly. “We can depose Tyrell and rule the langur ourselves. We can keep the empire he’s created and enjoy our privileges without having to uproot all over again.”

  He gazed at the troops, making his appeal directly to their indolence. “How far will we have to roam, how many battles will we have to fight before we find a life as good as the one we enjoy now?”

  Tentative nods of agreement told Oatsack that his point had hit home. All eyes turned to Hummingbird for a response.

  The leader drew himself up to his full height. “We are warriors who fight, not politicians who talk. Barbaries fight. It’s served us well for generations. If
Tyrell knew who he was, he wouldn’t have dreamed up his great plan. But he is doomed. And I tell you this: long after Tyrell has fallen, the Barbaries will still be a force that is feared and respected.”

  Hummingbird sat down with the gravitas of unshakeable conviction; his words had chimed with deep tribal memories, and in the silence the will of the Barbary troops swung behind him.

  Only Oatsack didn’t feel it. “Well, you’re wrong!” he blurted out petulantly. “All of you! This is just the kind of primitive thinking that condemns us to a life of brutality!”

  Hummingbird kept frighteningly calm. He stared Oatsack in the eye, and saw that this young monkey would always be trouble.

  “That’s not how the rest of us see it,” Hummingbird said coldly.

  —

  It was Breri who made the gruesome discovery.

  He had risen early to walk the perimeter wall, and saw a strange shape hanging from a branch of the lemon tree that marked the start of the Barbaries’ quarters.

  Breri strained his eyes in the dim light, trying to make out what the shape was, but couldn’t place it. He swung through the canopy to get a closer look…then froze in horror.

  Hanging by its feet was the battered and bloody body of Oatsack. His face had been pummeled until it was barely recognizable; his body was twisted and broken, the fur matted with thick clots of blood, some of which still dripped lazily into the dust.

  Desperate to raise the alarm, Breri stumbled past the lemon tree and into the Barbary compound…only to find it deserted. The apes had vanished in the night as if they’d never existed.

  Fear gripped Breri’s throat; he struggled to stop himself retching.

  Get to Tyrell. Must get to Tyrell, tell him what’s happened. Maybe the lord ruler already knew. Maybe he had sent the Barbaries on some secret mission.

  But even as he thought it, Breri knew it wasn’t true.

  And then he felt a drop of rain patter down on his head.

  The rhesus were perched on the water tower when the first drops of monsoon rain landed like falling berries hitting the dust.