The food they brought the travelers was largely an assortment of fruit and nuts, with some raw meat from birds the apes had killed. Rather than light a fire indoors and smoke up the house’s interior, the humans ate the fruit and nuts and supplemented it with some bread and dried meat from their own saddle pouches.
After the meal the three men left the house to look more closely at the bodies of the people who had attacked them. The apes had collected the bodies in one pile, apparently awaiting their new king’s orders for disposing of them.
“Why should they attack us?” Jafar wondered as they approached the pile of bodies. “We’ve made some enemies along the way, it’s true, but Kharouf is dead and this is awfully far from Punjar for King Zargov to send anyone after us.”
“They might be brig
