Monkey Wars Read Free Page B

across the room.
    “
I
am the master!”
    Still holding Mico above his head, Breri spun round and saw their father, Trumble, standing at the entrance.
    “Put. Him. Down.” Trumble spoke with utter self-assurance.
    For a moment Breri hesitated. It was a brief flash of rebellion, but Trumble saw it and knew that his eldest son was already starting to break away. Soon Breri would be his own monkey.
    But for now Trumble was still the head of this family, and he still had a few tricks up his sleeve. “Put him down before I swap this for a poky little crack in the cemetery wall. Then there’ll be no arguments.”
    Mico and Breri knew their father well enough to understand that this wasn’t a bluff. Reluctantly, Breri dropped Mico to the ground and skulked off.
    “Are you hurt?” Trumble asked gently.
    Mico shook his head. His father swung over and put his arms around him. Neither said anything; they didn’t need to. Trumble had lost count of the number of fights he’d broken up over the years; a vindictive streak ran deep in Breri, and there was no doubting the pleasure he derived from bullying Mico.
    Just then, from outside, they heard Kima call, “Fresh mangoes! Nice and juicy!” Which made Mico and Trumble feel suddenly hungry.
    —
    As the moon rose, bright and clear, Kima chased everyone out so that she could lay some fresh palm leaves on the floor. Breri scampered off to be with his cadet friends, who were discovering new swings up in the tree canopy. Left on his own, Mico decided to check out the views from the roof.
    When he scrambled up the pediment, though, he found his father already sitting there in a pool of cool moonlight, surrounded by carefully arranged piles of stones.
    In his youth Trumble had fought in the elites until a bad injury cut short his career. Desperate to still serve, he had become a quartermaster, responsible for troop supplies. Trumble’s logical mind was well suited to the job, but the key to his success was the stones.
    Over many seasons Trumble had carefully scoured Kolkata’s streets and collected a mass of small stones; some contained flashes of color, others were deep black, while a few were transparent like glass. Having carefully polished them all, Trumble set about devising a complex system of accounting. Some stones represented different types of food, others stood for weapons, that much Mico knew, but the clever part was how these stones were distributed across a set of empty coconut shells. This told Trumble exactly which provisions were running low, what had to be acquired today and what could wait.
    Only Trumble fully understood how the system worked, but the whole troop knew that it
did
work. Shortages were something the langur didn’t have to worry about.
    Mico watched Trumble carefully moving the stones from pile to pile, from coconut to coconut. Not wanting to disturb the air of studied concentration, Mico remained silent and instead started running his finger along the scar that stretched across his father’s back.
    Even though it was now an old wound, the fur stubbornly refused to grow back, leaving a bumpy pink ridge that was curiously insensitive to touch. Ever since he could remember, Mico had enjoyed running his finger along the scar, pressing harder and harder until his father noticed with a start.
    Tonight, though, Trumble quickly sensed that something was troubling Mico. He put the stones down and peered over his shoulder.
    “Not playing with the others?”
    Mico shrugged. “Did it hurt? When it happened, I mean?” he asked, stroking the scar again.
    “Not at the time. It was in the heat of battle. But afterward, when it was being patched up…” Trumble grimaced, remembering the pain.
    “Was there a lot of blood?”
    “Oh yes. It was a real mess.”
    Mico nodded. Now they were getting to the heart of the problem. “So…when you were in the elites…were there things you did that…did you ever have to…”
    “Did I have to kill?”
    Mico looked at