The Adventure of the Peerless Peer

by Philip José Farmer

  Though both were much younger than Holmes and I, they were in equally bad condition-probably, I suppose, because they had not practiced the good old British custom of walking whenever possible. Von Bork refused to talk to us, but Reich, always a gentleman, told us what had happened to his party.

  "We too heard the noises and that horrible cry," he said. "We made our way cautiously toward it, until we saw the carnage in a clearing. There were five dead men sprawled there, and six running in one direction and four in another. Standing with his foot on the chest of the largest corpse was a white man clad only in a leopard-skin. He was the one uttering that awful cry, which I would swear no human throat could make."

  "Der englische Affenmensch," Von Bork muttered, his only contribution to the conversation that evening.

  "Three of the men had arrows in them; the other two obviously had had their necks broken," Reich continued. "Von Bork whispered to me the wild man's identity, and so I whispered to my men to fire at him. Before we could do so, he had leaped up and pulled himself by a branch into a tree, and he was gone. We searched for him for some time without success. Then we started out to the east, but at dusk one of my men fell with an arrow through his neck. The angle of the arrow showed that it had come from above. We looked upward but could see nothing. Then a voice, speaking in excellent German, with a Brandenburger accent yet, ordered us to turn back. We were to march to the southwest. If we did not, one of us would die at dusk each day until no one was left. I asked him why we should do this, but there was no reply. Obviously, he had us entirely at his mercy-which, I suspected, from the looks of him, he utterly lacked."

  "He claims that German officers murdered his wife," Holmes said.

  "That's a lie!" Reich said indignantly. "More British propaganda! We are not the baby-bayoneting Huns your propaganda office portrays us as being!"

  "There are some bad apples in every barrel," Holmes replied coolly.

  Reich looked as if something had suddenly disturbed him. I thought it was a gas pain, but he said, "So, then, you met Greystoke! He told you this! But why did he desert you, leave you to fall into the hands of these savages?"

  "I don't know," Holmes said. "Please carry on with your story."

  "My first concern was the safety and well-being of my men. To have ignored Greystoke would have been to be brave but stupid. So I ordered the march to the southwest. After two days if became evident that Greystoke intended for us to starve to death. All our food was stolen that night, and we dared not leave the line of march to hunt, even though I doubt that we would have been able to shoot anything. The evening of the second day, I called out, begging that he let us at least hunt for food. He must have had some pangs of conscience, some mercy in him after all. That morning we woke to find a freshly killed wild pig, one of those orange-bristled swine, in the center of the camp. From somewhere in the branches overhead his voice came mockingly. 'Pigs should eat pigs!'

  "And so we struggled southwestward until today. We were attacked by these people. Greystoke had not ordered us to lay down our arms, so we gave a good account of ourselves. But only Von Bork and I survived, and we were knocked unconscious by the flats of their axes. And marched here, the Lord only knows for what end."

  "I suspect that the Lord of the Jungle, one of Greystoke's unofficial titles, knows," Holmes said glumly.

  9

  If Greystoke did know, he did not appear to tell us what to expect. Several days passed while we slept and ate and talked to Reich. Von Bork continued to ignore us, even though Holmes several times addressed him. Holmes asked him about his health, which I thought a strange concern for a man who had not killed us only because he lacked the opportunity.

  Holmes seemed especially interested in his left eye, once coming up to within a few inches of it and staring at it. Von Bork became enraged at this close scrutiny.

  "Get away from me, British swine!" he yelled. "Or I will ruin both of your eyes!"

  "Permit Dr. Watson to examine it," Holmes said. "He might be able to save it."

  "I want no incompetent English physician poking around it," Von Bork said.

  I became so indignant that I lectured him on the very high standards of British medicine, but he only turned his back on me. Holmes chuckled at this and winked at me.

  At the end of the week, we were allowed to leave the hut during the day, unaccompanied by guards. Holmes and I were not restrained in any way, though the Germans were hobbled with shackles so that they could not walk very fast. Apparently, our captors decided that Holmes and I were too old to give them much of a run for their money.

  We took advantage of our comparative freedom to stroll around the village, inspecting everything and also attempting to learn the language.

  "I don't know what family it belongs to," Holmes said. "But it is related neither to Cornish nor Chaldean, of that I'm sure."

  Holmes was also interested in the white china of these people, which represented their highest art form. The black figures and designs they painted upon it reminded me somewhat of early Greek vase paintings. The vases and dishes were formed from kaolin deposits which existed to the north near the precipices. I mention this only because the white clay was to play an important part in our salvation in the near future.

  At the end of the second week, Holmes, a superb linguist, had attained some fluency in the speech of our captors. "It belongs to a completely unknown language family," he said. "But there are certain words which, degenerated though they are, obviously come from ancient Persian. I would say that at one time these people had contact with a wandering party of descendants of Darius. The party settled down here, and these people borrowed some words from their idiom."

  The village consisted of a hundred huts arranged in concentric circles. Each held a family ranging from two to eight members. Their fields lay north of the village on the slopes leading up to the precipices. The stock consisted of goats, pigs, and dwarf antelopes. Their alcoholic drink was a sort of mead made from the honey of wild bees. A few specimens of these ventured near the village, and Holmes secured some for study. They were about an inch long, striped black and white, and were armed with a long venom-ejecting barb. Holmes declared that they were of a new species, and he saw no reason not to classify them as Apis holmesi.

  Once a week a party set out to the hills to collect honey. Its members were always clad in leather clothing and gloves and wore veils over their hats. Holmes asked permission to accompany them, explaining that he was wise in the ways of bees. To his disappointment, they refused him. A further inquiry by him resulted in the information that there was a negotiable, though difficult, pass through the precipices. It was used only for emergency purposes because of the vast number of bees that filled the narrow pass. Holmes obtained his data by questioning a child. Apparently, the adults had not thought to tell their young to keep silent about this means of exit.

  "The bee-warding equipment is kept locked up in their temple," Holmes said. "And that makes it impossible to obtain it for an escape attempt."

  The temple was the great hut in the village's centre. We were not allowed to enter it or even to approach it within fifty feet. Through some discreet inquiries, and unashamed eavesdropping, Holmes discovered that the high priestess-and-queen lived within the temple. We had never seen her nor were we likely to do so. She had been born in the temple and was to reside there until she died. Just why she was so restricted Holmes could not determine. His theory was that she was a sort of hostage to the gods.

  "Perhaps, Watson, she is confined because of a superstition that arose after the catastrophe which their myths say deluged this land and the great civilisation it harboured. The fishermen tell me that they often see on the bottom of this lake the sunken ruins of the stone houses in which their ancestors lived. A curse was laid upon the land, they say, and they hint that only by keeping the high priestess-cum-queen inviolate, unseen by profane eyes, untouched by anyone after pubescence, can the wrath of the gods be averted. They are cagey in what the
y say, so I have had to surmise certain aspects of their religion."

  "That's terrible!" I said. "The deluge?"

  "No, that a woman should be denied freedom and love."

  "She has a name, but I have never overheard it. They refer to her as The Beautiful One."

  "Is there nothing we can do for her?" I said. "I do not know that she wants to be helped.

  You must not allow your well-known gallantry to endanger us. But to satisfy a legitimate scientific interest, if anthropology is a science, we could perhaps attempt a look inside the temple. Its roof has a large circular hole in its center. If we could get near the top of the high tree about twenty yards from it, we could look down into the building."

  "With the whole village watching us?" I said. "No, Holmes, it is impossible to get up the tree unobserved during the day. And if we did so during the night, we could see nothing because of the darkness. In any event, it would probably mean instantaneous death even to make the attempt."

  "There are torches lit in the building at night," he said. "Come, Watson, if you have no taste for this arboreal adventure, I shall go it alone."

  And that was why, despite my deep misgivings, we climbed that towering tree on a cloudy night. After Von Bork and Reich had fallen asleep and our guards had dozed off and the village was silent except for a chanting in the temple, we crept out of our hut. Holmes had hidden a rope the day before, but even with this it was no easy task. We were not youths of twenty, agile as monkeys and as fearless aloft. Holmes threw the weighted end of the rope over the lowest branch, which was twenty feet up, and tied the two ends together.

  Then, grasping the rope with both hands, and bracing his feet against the trunk, he half-walked almost perpendicular to the trunk, up the tree. On reaching the branch, he rested for a long time while he gasped for breath so loudly that I feared he would wake up the nearest villagers. When he was quite recovered, he called down to me to make the ascent. Since I was heavier and several years older, and lacked his feline muscles, having more the physique of a bear, I experienced great difficulty in getting up. I wrapped my legs around the rope — no walking at a ninety-degree angle to the tree for me — and painfully and gaspingly hauled myself up. But I persisted — after all, I am British — and Holmes pulled me up at the final stage of what I was beginning to fear was my final journey.

  After resting, we made a somewhat easier ascent via the branches to a position about ten feet below the top of the tree. From there we could look almost directly down through the hole in the middle of the roof. The torches within enabled us to see its interior quite clearly.

  Both of us gasped when we saw the woman standing in the centre of the building by a stone altar. She was a beautiful woman, surely one of the daintiest things that ever graced this planet. She had long golden hair and eyes that looked dark from where we sat but which, we later found out, were a deep grey. She was wearing nothing except a necklace of some stones that sparkled as she moved. Though I was fascinated, I also felt something of shame, as if I were a peeping tom. I had to remind myself that the women wore nothing above the waist in their everyday attire and that when they swam in the lake they wore nothing at all. So we were doing nothing immoral by this spying. Despite this reasoning, my face (and other things) felt inflamed.*

  [*The parentheses are the editor's. Watson had crossed out this phrase, though not enough to make it illegible. Editor.]

  She stood there, doing nothing for a long time, which I expected would make Holmes impatient. He did not stir or make any comment, so I suppose that this time he did not mind a lack of action. The priestesses chanted and the priests walked around in a circle making signs with their hands and their fingers. Then a bound he-goat was brought in and placed on the altar, and, after some more mumbo-jumbo, the woman cut its throat. The blood was caught in a golden bowl and passed around in a sort of communion, the woman drinking first.

  "A most unsanitary arrangement," I murmured to Holmes.

  "These people are, nevertheless, somewhat cleaner than your average Londoner," Holmes replied. "And much more cleanly than your Scots peasant."

  I was about to take umbrage at this, since I am of Scots descent on my mother's side. Holmes knew both this and my sensitivity about it. He had been making too many remarks of this nature recently, and though I attributed them to irritability arising from nicotine withdrawal, I was, to use an American phrase, getting fed up with them. I was about to remonstrate when my heart leaped into my throat and choked me.

  A hand had come from above and clamped down upon my shoulder. I knew that it wasn't Holmes' because I could see both of his hands.

  10

  Holmes almost fell off the branch but was saved by another hand, which grasped him by the collar of his shirt. A familiar voice said, "Silence!"

  "Greystoke!" I gasped. And then, remembering that, after all, he was a duke, I said, "Your pardon. I mean, Your Grace."

  "What are you doing up here, you baboon!" Holmes said.

  I was shocked at this, though I knew that Holmes spoke thus only because he must have been thoroughly frightened. To address a high British nobleman in this manner was not his custom.

  "Tut, tut, Holmes," I said.

  "Tut, tut yourself," he replied. "He's not paying me a fee! He's no client of mine. Besides, I doubt that he is entitled to his title!"

  A growl that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck came from above. It was followed by the descent of the duke's heavy body upon our branch, which bent alarmingly. But Greystoke squatted upon it, his hands free, with all the ease of the baboon he had been accused of being.

  "What does that last remark mean?" he said. At that moment the moon broke through the clouds. A ray fell upon Holmes' face, which was as pale as when he had been playing the dying detective. He said, "This is neither the time nor the place for an investigation of your credentials. We are in a desperate plight, and . . . "

  "You don't realise how desperate," Greystoke said. "I usually abide by human laws when I am in civilisation or among the black blood-brothers of my ranch in East Africa. But when I am in my larger estate, that of Central Africa, when I am in the jungle, where I have a higher rank even than duke, where, to put it simply, I am the king, where I revert to my primal and happiest state, that of a great ape . . . "

  Good Lord! I thought. And this is the man Holmes referred to as inarticulate!

  ". . . then I obey only my own laws, not those of humanity, for which I have the greatest contempt, barring a few specimens of such . . . "

  There was much more in this single statement, the length of which would have made any German philosopher proud. The gist of it was that if Holmes did not explain his remark now, he would have no chance to do so later. Nor was the duke backward in stating that I would not be taking any news of Holmes' fate to the outside world.

  "He means it, Holmes!" I said.

  "I am well aware of that, Watson," he answered. "His Grace is covered only with a thin veneer of civilisation."

  This phrase, I remembered, was one used often by the American novelist to describe his protagonist's assumption of human culture.

  "Very well, Your Highness," Holmes said.

  "It is not my custom to set forth a theory until I have enough evidence to make it a fact. But under the circumstances . . . "

  I looked for Greystoke to show some resentment at Holmes' sarcastic use of a title appropriate only to a monarch. He, however, only smiled. This, I believe, was a reaction of pleasure, of ignorance of Holmes' intent to cut him. He was sure that he deserved the title, and now that I have had time to reflect on it, I agree with him. Though a duke in England, in Africa he ruled a kingdom many times larger than our tight little isle. And he paid no taxes in it.

  "Watson and I were acquainted with the ten-year-old son of the sixth duke, your reputed father," Holmes said. "That boy, the then Lord Saltire, is not you. Yet you have the title that should be his. You notice that I do not say the title should rightly be his. You are the legit
imate inheritor of the late duke's titles and estates. Titles and estates, by the way, that should never have been his or his son's."

  "Good Lord, Holmes!" I said. "What are you saying?"

  "If you will refrain from interrupting, you will hear what I'm saying," he responded sharply. "Your Grace, that American novelist who has written a highly fictionalised novel based on your rather . . . ahem . . . non-conventional behaviour in Africa, came closer to the truth than anybody but yourself, and a few of your friends, I presume, realise. Watson tells me that in the novel your father, who should have been the seventh duke, was marooned on the shores of western Africa with his wife. There you were born, and when your parents died, you were adopted by a tribe of large intelligent apes hitherto unknown to science. They were strictly a product of a romantic imagination, of course, and the apes must have been either chimpanzees or gorillas, both of which du Chaillu has reported seeing in West Africa. Neither, however, exists at ten degrees south latitude, which is where the novelist said you were born and raised. I would place your birth further north, say somewhere near or in the very country, Gabon, which du Chaillu visited."

  "Elementary, my dear Holmes," Greystoke said, smiling slightly again. I warmed to him somewhat, since it was evident by his remark that he was acquainted with my narratives of the adventures of Holmes and myself. A man who read these, and with evident pleasure, couldn't be all bad.

  "If it is elementary," Holmes said with some asperity, "I am still the only man complex enough to have grasped the truth."

  "Not all of it," Greystoke replied. "That Yank writer was quite correct in his guess that the tribe that raised me was unknown to science. However, they were not great apes but a sort of apemen, beings halfway on the evolutionary ladder between Homo sapiens and the ape. They had speech, which, though simple, was still speech. And that is why I did not become incapable of using language, as all other feral humans so far discovered have been incapable. Once a child passes a certain age without encountering human speech, he is mentally retarded."