Monkey Wars (41 page)

T
he door creaked open and daylight penetrated the darkness. At first nothing; no movement, no sound, just the rancid stench of imprisonment.

Mico peered into the gloom, clinging to the hope that in these last few cells he would be spared the worst horrors of the tyranny. As his eyes scoured the darkness, he heard a faint gasp.

“Mico…” The voices were so weak they were barely audible, but it was enough to know they were still alive.

“It's safe now,” Mico said gently.

He knew he mustn't rush them; they had to emerge slowly from the depths of captivity. He stepped away from the door and listened to the feet shuffling closer. Then slowly, eyes squinting, two monkeys crawled into the light of freedom.

Mico felt the strength drain from his body as he looked at the degraded figures of his parents. He drew his arms around Trumble and Kima and held them tightly. It was a far cry from the triumphant liberation Mico had always imagined.

For an age they just crouched there, huddled in silence, terrified that if they spoke it would shatter this dream.

Only when he was sitting in the warm sunlight of the Great Lawn was Trumble finally able to thank his son. His voice thick with emotion, he reached his hand up to touch Mico's face.

“You came back for us…when everyone else had given up.”

“Of course I came back.”

Mico hesitated, looked down, then finally found the courage to ask, “And Hister?”

Trumble knew the very least he owed his son was the truth. “She gave up.”

“She's dead?” whispered Mico, the guilt rising in his gut.

Trumble shook his head. “She gave up on
you
. She collaborated.”

“Where is she now?”

But Trumble just shook his head. “We heard nothing in the darkness of the cell. Nothing.”

Mico hadn't seen Hister in the fighting, nor in the crowds that lined the paths of the Eastern Province as the conquering rhesus had marched in. She had vanished. Now he would never know what had become of her; it was another regret marring his triumph.

But there were no regrets for most of the rhesus, who relished their total victory.

Victory, though, gave them a whole new problem: what to do with all the conquered monkeys?

“Vengeance,” said Twitcher uncompromi
singly, his voice resonating in the summer house, where the rhesus had gathered for a debate about the future. “Before anything else, the guilty must be punished.” He had hoped for a rousing cheer of support, but it didn't come. A few rhesus nodded their agreement, but to most his dark tone was at odds with the sense of relief that the war was over.

“Surely we had our vengeance when we defeated their army,” said Mico.

“Easy for you to say,” snapped Twitcher. “You didn't lose everything.” He looked around the room, his eyes challenging anyone to question his right to hate the langur. “Papina, your parents were murdered by them. You must understand?”

She nodded sympatheti
cally. “No one's suffered more than you…but Fig knew what she was doing.”

“Then we should honor that and take our vengeance.”

“Tyrell is dead, his regime destroyed,” said Mico emphatically.

“But it wasn't just Tyrell,” retorted Twitcher. “You said it yourself—they
all
knew what was going on. Every single langur took food from Tyrell, sent their young to join his army, cheered his victories. They were all collaborators; now they have to answer for it.”

“How?” asked Papina with disarming simplicity. “With another massacre? Is that really what Fig died for?”

“I didn't fight just to forgive!” cried Twitcher.

“We fought so that truth could prevail,” said Mico. “And it will. Each and every langur needs to confess their role in Tyrell's regime, acknowledge they were wrong—”

“Talking!” Twitcher spat the word out with contempt. “Is that it? Just talking!”

“He held them in his sway!” Mico insisted. “You can't imagine what it was like to be caught up in that rush of power.”

“
You
broke free.
They
didn't.” Twitcher pointed out of the window indignantly. “Which is why they're guilty.”

Papina looked anxiously from Mico to Twitcher. Now that the pressures of battle were lifted, the cracks of old rivalries were opening up again. “I share your anger,” she said, trying to ease the tension, “but I don't think it's going to help.”

She swung over to one of the windows and looked pensively out across the lawns where groups of langurs were huddled together. “Look at them. It's like they've woken from a dream. A nightmare. Monkeys question—it's what we do. We question and we test; we break and we discover. It's messy, but it's what makes us what we are. Tyrell made them forget that.”

Papina turned back to the rhesus. “If we storm out there and punish, kill, exile, their instincts will be to fight back. But if we give them the space to see what they've done, to understand how they betrayed themselves…” She looked at Twitcher. “To win the war we needed to believe that all langurs were guilty, but to win the peace we need to believe that most of them are innocent.”

She sat down, letting her words do their work, and one by one the monkeys started to tap the ground with their fists. Tentatively the support grew until the room reverberated with the sound of thumping.

There were notable exceptions
—Twitcher sat immobile and silent; Cadby crossed his arms defiantly, refusing to join in the applause; young Joop also sat in silence—he too felt that the war would not be finished until more langur blood had been shed.

For now, though, the dissenters would have to remain silent. The majority of rhesus favored reconcilia
tion, so that became the new policy.

The argument had rattled Mico. There was so much to sort out—food supplies, living quarters, security, education—all of which depended on rhesus and langur living together peacefully.

“Can this really work?” he asked Papina as they walked across the Great Lawn.

“Whatever we do, it has to be better than Tyrell's cruelty,” she said calmly.

“We may just have replaced order with chaos.”

“Stop!” Papina looked at him, her eyes dancing with conviction. “Don't talk like that. Now we can dare to hope—and that's progress.”

“You can't eat hope,” said Mico.

Papina laughed. “You'd be surprised how long it can keep you going.”

As a surprise, she had prepared Tyrell's old room at the top of the summer house tower for the two of them and, without another word, she took Mico by the hand and led him there.

It was beautiful, dressed with fruits and flowers, scented with spices, the floor covered with fresh palm leaves.

As Mico and Papina lay together that afternoon, the rest of the world faded away….There was nothing but the two of them.

Mico woke with a start. He could tell from the background noise of the city that it was the dead of night, but for the first time in many moons he didn't feel tired.

Gently he disentangled himself from Papina's embrace, took a refreshing drink from the water bowl, and gazed at the carved map on the wall where Tyrell had laid out his vision of the city without humans. Now that the regime was toppled, you could see the map for what it really was—a deluded work of insanity.

How could anyone ever have taken it seriously? But they had. The entire langur troop followed Tyrell way beyond the realms of reason.

Just to reassure himself that the city remained unmolested, Mico walked to the window to breathe in the sticky night air.

A mist hung above the rooftops diffusing the lights and bathing everything in a surreal glow. It was strange to look across the skyline and not fear what was out there, to enjoy the view without planning an escape route. Peace would take some getting used to.

Then just as he turned back, Mico saw a movement down on the lawns. He peered into the gloom…and gradually his eyes started to make out figures sitting silently under the night sky. The more he stared, the more monkeys he saw…family after family…the whole troop of langur monkeys had gathered and were all staring up at him, as if in a trance.