Kull: Exile of Atlantis (2 page)

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 S
words 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 been 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.”

A tiger in chains would be a crime, a contravention of the natural order to which only decadent Valusians (or the Romans of
Kings of the Night
) might stoop. Where the lion is the king of beasts, and also the preferred beast of kings, the tiger’s aura is more Eastern and exotic–one of the ways Howard establishes that we are vastly displaced in time is to have tigers roaring “across the starlight” on the beaches of Atlantis. And the tiger hunts in splendid isolation; he is a predator without a pride, a fitting totem for Kull (and perhaps his creator). “I–thought you were a human tiger,” the Ala of
By This Axe!
confesses, shortly before Kull is forced to demonstrate many of his most tigerish qualities, but the linkage begins before we even leave Atlantis, with the hunters’ debate as to whether a king tiger once scaled a vine to the moon to escape hunters and dwelt there “for many years.”

Another 1928 Howard letter to another friend, Tevis Clyde Smith, contains references to demi-gods attaining pinnacles, “the deeds of unthoughted heroes,” the “crude, groping handiwork” of authorial beginners and writers “struggling up the long ladder.” The latter two images are suggestive of one of the staggering vistas of
The Shadow Kingdom
, in which Man is “the jest of the gods, the blind, wisdomless striver from dust to dust, following the long bloody trail of his destiny, knowing not why, bestial, blundering, like a great murderous child, yet feeling somewhere a spark of divine fire.” Howard went on in the same letter to claim that he was familiar with “the emptiness of success” despite not having succeeded yet: “For always through the cheers of the mob will come, like a writhing serpent, the memory of the jeers of the mob when I walked and sweated pure red blood.” This reads like a rough draft of the early scenes in
The Shadow Kingdom
, and not just because of Howard’s tendency to assign fangs, coils, and scales to anything negative; the mingled cheers and jeers are also noteworthy. Behind the Atlantean usurper who can command obedience but never legitimacy, we can discern the aspiring author too often rejected and too quickly dejected. But the spark of divine fire would continue to motivate Howard to sweat pure red blood; when he confided to Tevis Clyde Smith in November of 1928 that “I’ve got the makings of a great writer in me, but I’ll never become one because I’m too erratic and lazy to really try and keep on trying,” he sold himself short.

The makings of that great writer are on display here, but the Kull stories differ from Howard’s Thirties output in part because of “a certain archaic tang”–aye, nay, ye, mayhap–which he himself attributed to “much medieval reading.” The Faerie fringes of the series border on what is unhelpfully called high fantasy, nor should we overlook mordant flickers that we might sooner expect from a James Branch Cabell or Clark Ashton Smith: Brule’s ancestry includes “a legendary hero or two, semi-deified for feats of personal strength or wholesale murder,” while Ascalante has noticed that “Poets always hate those in power and turn to dead ages for relief in dreams.” Howard’s nomenclature is not yet the thing of cheerfully borrowed beauty it will become, although “Valusia,” with its hints of “allusion” and “illusion,” is perfect for a kingdom that is the Thurian Continent’s many-magicked Heart of Elderness, and Goron bora Ballin and Ronaro Atl Volante are convincingly aristocratic appellations.