The Peerless Peer by Philip José Farmer

Author:Philip José Farmer [Farmer, Philip José]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780857681201
Google: lGTAcQAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 9740974
Publisher: Titan
Published: 1974-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

He seemed to be a giant, though actually he was only about three inches taller than Holmes. His bones were large, extraordinarily so, and though he was muscular, the muscles were not the knots of the professional strong man. Where a wrestler or weight lifter recalls a gorilla, he resembled a leopard. The face was handsome and striking. His hair was chopped off at the base of the neck, apparently by use of the huge hunting knife in the scabbard suspended by an antelope-skin belt just above the leopard-skin loincloth. The hair was as black as an Arab's, as was the bronzed skin which was criss-crossed with scars. His eyes were large and dark grey and had about them something both feral and remote. His nose was straight, his upper lip was short, and his chin was square and clefted.

He held in one hand a short thick bow of some wood and carried on his back a quiver with a dozen more arrows.

So this is Lord Greystoke, I thought. Yes, his features are enough like those of the ten-year-old Lord Saltire we rescued in the adventure of the Priory School for him to be a twin. But this man radiates a frightening ferality, a savagery more savage than any possessed by the most primitive of men. This could not possibly be the scion of an ancient British stock, not by any stretch of the fancy the English gentleman that Saltire had been even at the age of ten. This man had been raised in a school that made the hazing of the Priory, Rugby, and Oxford seem like the child's play that it was.

Of course, I thought, he may be mad. How otherwise account for the strange tales that floated about the clubs and the salons of our nobility and gentry?

However, I thought, he could be a product which the British occasionally turn out. Every once in a while, a son of our island, affected in some mystical way by the Orient or Africa, goes more native than the native. There was Sir Richard Francis Burton, more Arab than the Arab, and Lord John Roxton, who was said to be wilder than the Amazon Indians with whom he consorted.

During the next few minutes I decided that the first guess, that he had gone mad, was the correct one.

He said, in a deep rich baritone, "I am known as Lord Greystoke, among other things." Without offering to shake our hands or determine our identity, as any true gentleman would, he put upon the snake one naked foot, calloused an inch thick on its sole, and he pulled the arrow out. He wiped it on the grass, replaced the arrow in the quiver, and cut off the head of the reptile. While we stared in fascination and disgust, he skinned the cobra and then began biting off chunks of its meat and chewing it. The blood dripped down his chin while he stared with those beautiful but wild eyes at us.

"Would you care for some?" he said, and he grinned at us most bloodily.

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