Kull: Exile of Atlantis Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  About this Book

  Plates

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Untitled Story (previously published as “Exile of Atlantis”)

  The Shadow Kingdom

  The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune

  Untitled Draft

  The Cat and the Skull

  The Screaming Skull of Silence

  The Striking of the Gong

  The Altar and the Scorpion

  The Curse of the Golden Skull

  The Black City (Unfinished Fragment)

  Untitled Fragment

  By This Axe I Rule!

  Swords of the Purple Kingdom

  The King and the Oak

  Kings of the Night

  Miscellanea

  The “Am-ra of the Ta-an” Fragments

  Summer Morn

  Am-ra the Ta-an

  The Tale of Am-ra

  Untitled and Unfinished Fragment

  Untitled and Incomplete Fragment

  The Shadow Kingdom (Draft)

  Delcardes’ Cat

  The King and the Oak (Draft)

  Appendices

  Atlantean Genesis

  Notes on the Original Howard Texts

  The Fully Illustrated Robert E. Howard Library from Del Rey Books

  Praise for Robert E. Howard

  Copyright

  I’d like to dedicate my work in this book to my wife, Julie.

  Justin Sweet

  Untitled Story

  first published in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967 (as “Exile of Atlantis”)

  The Shadow Kingdom

  first published in Weird Tales, August 1929

  The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune

  first published in Weird Tales, September 1929

  Untitled Draft

  original version first published in Kull, Bantam Books, 1978

  The Cat and the Skull

  first published in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967 (as “Delcardes’ Cat”)

  The Skull of Silence

  first published in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967

  The Striking of the Gong

  original version first published in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, Zebra Books, 1976

  The Altar and the Scorpion

  first published in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967

  The Curse of the Golden Skull

  first published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967

  The Black City

  original version first published in Kull, Bantam Books, 1978

  Untitled Fragment

  original version first published in Kull, Bantam Books, 1978

  By This Axe I Rule!

  first published in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967

  Swords of the Purple Kingdom

  first published in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967

  The King and the Oak

  first published in Weird Tales, February 1939

  Kings of the Night

  first published in Weird Tales, November 1930

  Summer Morn appears here for the first time

  Am-ra the Ta-an

  first published in A Rhyme of Salem Town and Other Poems,

  Robert E. Howard Properties LLC, 2002

  The Tale of Am-ra

  first published in The New Howard Reader 2, August 1998

  Untitled and Unfinished Fragment appears here for the first time

  Untitled and Incomplete Fragment appears here for the first time

  The Shadow Kingdom (draft) appears here for the first time

  Delcardes’ Cat (draft) appears here for the first time

  The King and the Oak (draft)

  first published in The New Howard Reader 1, June 1998

  Plates

  Kull - Exile of Atlantis Frontispiece

  “Kull! Ha, accursed usurper from the pagan isles”

  “They be all serpent men!”

  There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness.

  “I am Kull, of Valusia”

  Delcardes’ cat

  …a test of might and endurance.

  Kull sat at ease on the throne of society.

  She did not hear the light footfalls.

  He made a terrible and primordial picture.

  They flooded the stair like a black wave of death.

  Foreword

  This has been a long trip filled with great moments and great struggle. It’s been five years since I was first asked to work on a volume of the Robert E. Howard library of classics. I sit here now, nearly finished with it all, thinking how fortunate I’ve been to get this assignment. I fulfilled a dream I had when starting out, back in my first illustration class in college, where I told my instructor that I wanted to illustrate books “like N. C. Wyeth.”

  Well, I’ve done it. Not like Wyeth, to be sure, but like me. Not only having the chance to illustrate a book, but being given a series of stories by a great author, Robert E. Howard, with one of his greatest creations, Kull of Atlantis.

  It’s tough to end this, to finally let it stand as my take. To let go of everything else it could have been–and God knows, if it wasn’t for publisher, family, and debt, I’d continue trying to get it right. “Right” being some impossible marriage that would fit what Howard had in mind and fully convey what I dreamed could be.

  So as I let go now, I hope that I’ve served Howard well, and that, if he could look upon these images, he would forgive the inaccuracies and be pleased with the spirit that I’ve put into Kull and his world.

  Justin Sweet

  2006

  Introduction

  Is it not passing brave to be a king,

  And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  —Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part One

  Kull of high Atlantis. Kull, who will never be “of” Valusia no matter how long he rules the Land of Enchantment. Kull, cold-eyed but hot-headed, a bull in an unimaginably ancient china shop. Kull, the thinking man’s barbarian and the barbarian as thinking man, for whom the surfaces of forbidden lakes and sorcerous mirrors are not barriers but invitations. Kull, who opens Pandora’s boxes like birthday gifts. Kull, who returns the stare of Deep Time and dares the stair that leads up to perspectives high, chilly, and cosmic. The king who philosophizes with a broadsword and legislates with a battle-axe, the king who haunts us because he is himself so haunted. Kull, who is no mere way-station en route to Conan, but an unforgettable destination in his own right.

  Like their hero, who is quotable whether expressing ominous amusement–to the lake-dwellers of The Cat and the Skull, as they close in with daggers: “This is a game I understand, ghosts”–or an elegiac impulse, as to the wizard Tuzun Thune: “Yet is it not a pity that the beauty and glory of men should fade like smoke on the summer sea?”–the Kull stories can speak for themselves. But some readers might enjoy the Atlantean usurper even more if we spend a few pages situating him both within the grand overarching continuum that resulted from Robert E. Howard’s talent for rewriting and pre-writing history and within the Texas fictioneer’s abbreviated but altogether astonishing career.

  It is not quite accurate to label The Shadow Kingdom, which introduced Weird Tales readers to King Kull in the August 1929 issue (the untitled vignette many of us first met as Exile of Atlantis, with its glimpse of the Kull who would be king, was not published until 1967), the original sword-and-sorcery story. To do so is to overlook an earlier masterpiece, Lord Dunsany’s 1910 The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth, in which a swordsman invades the hellish, dragon-guarded stronghold of an archmage. But the Howard tale jumps out at us as not only the first American sword-and-sorcery story but the
first to summon a series into being by offering a setting, an arena, greater than was required for just a single adventure, a setting the depth and detail of which all but demanded sequels. With Kull’s Pre-Cataclysmic Age there arrived an American fantasyland defined by danger and doubt rather than the bumptious Midwestern boosterism of Oz or the sword-and-planet self-infatuation of John Carter of Mars, the extent of whose ego at times suggests that Helium, the Barsoomian city-state he rises to rule, is exceedingly well-named.

  The barbarians of the late Pre-Cataclysmic Age are offshore islanders who prey on the Thurian mainland from Atlantis, Lemuria, and the Pictish Isles as if from unsinkable pirate ships. The times call for blood and iron, but Thurian blood has thinned and their iron has corroded; where the dominant civilization of the Hyborian Age will be “so virile that contact with it virtually snatched out of the wallow of savagery such tribes as it touched,” the Seven Empires of the Pre-Cataclysmic dodder and totter. This is a world less mapped than Conan’s and more lapped by mystery and mysticism at its edges: ice caves in the far north, reptile-reeking jungles in the far south; to the west, the isles beyond the sunset, to the east, the River Stagus and World’s End. We learn that Verulian trickery is a byword, and that Thurania is the foe of Farsun, but what Howard is really telling in the Kull stories is Time. Untold centuries, millennia, and aeons of the stuff are told, and told tellingly, as we sense history shading back into prehistory, kings dimming into chiefs, palaces into caves, nations into tribes, laws into taboos. The whole point to Thurian civilization is its stupefying continuity and longevity; at the very dawn of Pictish or Atlantean awareness, dusk had already draped the Seven Empires. Their relative opacity or obscurity, the fact that they are not readily identifiable as stand-ins or surrogate-states as are Stygia for Egypt, Zingara for Spain, and Turan for the Ottoman Empire in the Conan series, draws us deeper into dreamland.

  Kull’s project of rejuvenating Valusia is not so much foredoomed as after-doomed by The Hyborian Age, an essay that Howard did not write until 1932, and it is important to keep in mind that the Pre-Cataclysmic Age is unaware of being the Pre-Cataclysmic Age, is unaware that the Cataclysm is poised overhead throughout the series, a Sword of Damocles forged from water and wind, lava, and tremors. Or is it? Signs and portents like the death by drowning of the “outlaw tribe” of Tiger Valley recalled by the Atlantean characters or the casual reference to “the Flood” in Swords of the Purple Kingdom are present. The lake-king has it almost right when he sees in Kull “the first wave of the rising tide of savagery which shall overwhelm the world,” and Kull himself asserts “Someday the sea will flow over these hills–” as early as Exile, long before Tuzun Thune’s mirror reflects a future in which “the restless green waves roar for many a fathom above the eternal hills of Atlantis” and “strange savages roam the elder lands.” Howard was well aware that a writer who avails himself of the name “Atlantis” gives away his ending, which is why he traveled back ages and ages in advance of that ending, the symbol of imperial overreach and the human jostling of the divine since Plato, to a joltingly flint-tipped and cave-sheltering beginning. And, yes, the Atlantis of the Kull series is fiendishly difficult to reconcile with that of Howard’s novellas Skull-Face and The Moon of Skulls, so perhaps we should mutter something about the hobgoblin of little minds and leave off trying.

  At the start of his Conan years Howard looked upon his Kull years not as a false start but a foundation; he built The Phoenix on the Sword from By This Axe I Rule! (unsold and therefore for practical purposes untold) and built the Pre-Cataclysmic Age into the back-story of The Hyborian Age and the eyewitness account of Yag-kosha, the long-lived, far-sighted being of The Tower of the Elephant. When Howard wrote of the Thurians in 1932 that “Picts, Atlanteans, and Lemurians were their generals, their statesmen, often their kings,” he had long since created in Kelkor just such a general, in Ka-nu just such a statesman, and in Kull just such a king. That same opening to The Hyborian Age adds to our knowledge by citing “the wars between Valusia and Commoria” (a realm nowhere mentioned in the actual Kull stories) as an implicit prelude to “the conquests by which the Atlanteans founded a kingdom on the mainland.” And as Yag-kosha tells it, the Post-Cataclysmic Age was marked by an intensification of the “wild wars and world-ancient feuds” of the earlier period. The remnants of the Pictish and Atlanteans would “go down to ruin, locked in bloody wars. We saw the Picts sink into abysmal savagery, the Atlanteans into apedom again…Wesaw [Conan’s] people rise under a new name from the jungles of the apes that had been Atlanteans.” Kull, who readily admits to a early childhood as a “hairless ape roaming in the woods,” one that “could not speak the language of men,” turns out to have been a sort of preview of coming subtractions for the Atlanteans after the Cataclysm.

  The Kull stories wander far afield in time, but spatially seldom stray from Valusia–which is why Howard’s tantalizing River Stagus/Beyond the Sunrise fragment, with its hot pursuit traversing whole kingdoms otherwise unexplored in the series, is so welcome. The continuity of circumstance that distinguishes Kull from Conan makes possible a recurring cast, a Howardian repertory company the members of which include Ka-nu, an avuncular ambassador not just from Pictland but from the mellowing and maturation that Kull cannot imagine undergoing himself. Ka-nu’s barb in The Cat and the Skull–“Naturally, I went first to the torture chamber, since Tu was in charge–” tells us most of what we need to know about Tu, who despite his second person familiar pronoun of a name has little tolerance for informality and upholds tradition all the more blindly and bureaucratically for having been born a plebian. The chief councilor, who will brook no challenge to the State’s law, is anticipated by Gor-na in Exile of Atlantis, who will brook no challenge to the tribe’s lore. When Gor-na scolds Kull for skepticism, he voices the outlook that the outcast-to-be will struggle against throughout the series: “What always was, must always be.”

  We are accustomed to Howard’s Picts as the destroyers of a civilization at the end of the Hyborian Age and the defiers of a civilization in the age of the Caesars, but in the Kull stories we must adjust to Picts as defenders of the decrepit civilization to which they are allied. Those defenders are led by Brule the Spear-slayer, a study, years before Conan, of the Beyond the Black River dictum that “a wolf [is] no less a wolf” because he chooses or chances “to run with the watch-dogs.” The power not behind but beside Kull’s throne, he often functions as a reality principle in the series: “Ever the Pict’s fierce secret whisper brought [Kull] back from the realm of unreality in which he moved.” In their 1987 overview of Howard’s work, Marc A. Cerasini and Charles Hoffman illuminated the Kull stories with the perfect line from William Blake: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” yet for all the wisdom he gains, Kull, the tiger of wrath, must be saved again and again by Brule, the horseman of instruction: When it is necessary to ride to Kull’s rescue, or ride across the continent in the service of Kull’s revenge, the Picts saddle up, and although the great days when Howard would annex Texas for heroic fantasy are yet to come, the “lean, powerful savages, men of Brule’s tribe, who [sit] their horses like centaurs” suggest the Comanches-turned-cavalry.

  It would never occur to Brule that the pen is mightier than the sword, which is why he urges Kull to arrange for the seditious poet Ridondo to “make rhymes for the vultures.” By This Axe I Rule! is the only story in which Ridondo appears, although his songs live on after him in Swords of the Purple Kingdom. He permits Howard, whose poetry filled many pages but paid few bills, to have fun with a fellow blue-eyed versifier. When we meet Ridondo, he is clad in jester’s motley but brandishes a dagger and exults in the assassination he has sworn to achieve. Meanwhile Kull, the peerless warrior, is first seen behind “a small writing desk,” and the seeming role reversal continues as king strives to spare poet while poet strives to slay king. Kull is not a Celtic character, except retroactively, in that Howard decided years later that the Atlanteans had bee
n the progenitors of the Cimmerians, who were the forefathers of the Celts. But the barbarian’s reverence for the bard, even one as cracked and citified as Ridondo, earns him honorary Celt status–and also a near-fatal wound when the poet pens him “a deathly song” in his unprotected side. In effect one chink in Kull’s armor has found another, and it is interesting to note this observation by his creator in a 1928 letter: “Each time a man opens his heart he breaks his armor and weakens his battle might.”

  During the Kull years Howard the apprentice took over from Howard the amateur. He was less market-minded than he would become, and the series exhibits not the precision-guided productivity of the later professional but a purple and gold romanticism that is not uncommon in a writer barely into his twenties. Much less common are the distinctively Howardian black borders and gray backgrounds of all that purple and gold. Dreamy but not drowsy, melancholy but not morose, these stories are the work of a young man who never became very old at all. Like Kull, that young man was both fascinated and appalled by extremities of age and reveries of remembrance, while also being constantly goaded by “the vagaries of a people which could never understand him.”

  Howard himself may have given us tacit permission to perceive Kull as his attitudinal doppelgänger in an October 1928 letter to his friend Harold Preece: “An occultist of my acquaintance, who has gone deeper in the matter than any man I ever knew, says I have a very ancient soul, am a reincarnated Atlantean, in fact!” With Kull, the feral child is father to the man; he knows not “who his own parents were,” an ignorance that perhaps at times seemed like bliss to Howard as he coped with the squalls and squabbles of life in a small family in a small town. Kull’s ostensibly absolute power is often merely powerlessness prettified by pageantry, and the entire series clanks with chains, literalizations of the fetters the only son of Isaac and Hester Howard felt chafing him, from the “heavy wooden chain, a peculiar thing which was particularly Atlantean in its manufacture,” in which the Ala of the Exile story awaits burning at the stake, to the “chains of friendship, tribe, and tradition” broken in The Shadow Kingdom. The phantasmal Eallal proceeds with “slow, silent footsteps, as if the chains of all the ages were upon those vague feet,” and as Kull unleashes his inner berserker on the serpent-men Howard tells us “But now some chain had broken in his soul.” One of the fragments espouses an equality of the remarkable “beyond the shackles of birth and circumstance,” and Kull breaks the news to the second Ala that “the king is only a slave like yourself, locked with heavier chains.”