Kull: Exile of Atlantis (3 page)

If it can seem as if the principal business of the late Pre-Cataclysmic Age is preventing or punishing mixed marriages, Howard, who dreamed so much, certainly never dreamed that all of his Kull outtakes would be published and pored over. Willful but wile-dependent, the women who plague Kull with their nuptial agendas are like unto little sisters, the creations of a bookish young man more comfortable grappling with the riddles of existence than with girls. The time for Valeria of the Red Brotherhood and Agnes de la Fere is not yet; although the second Ala shows promise, and more than just a single consonant separates the Delcartes of
Swords of the Purple Kingdom
from the Delcardes of
The Cat and the Skull
. In a crisis Howard even allows Delcartes to pounce “as quickly and silently as a tigress.”

Delcardes and Delcartes have something of the flapper about them, and that is only appropriate, for the Kull series is a product not just of Howard’s twenties but “the Twenties,” a decade that roared louder than all the tigers of Atlantis. The writing of these stories coincided with the exact moment, post-colonial but pre-imperial, in which American literature came into its own and became aware of itself, of the power of what had already been written and the promise of what soon would be. At the risk of a fanciful comparison, the Atlantean usurper in his palace is as much an expression of this cultural quickening or kindling as is Jay Gatsby in his mansion. Furthermore, to say that
The Shadow Kingdom
is the first American sword-and-sorcery story is to mean much more than simply the first such story authored by an American. American concerns populate and animate much of the series.

Conan will come down from the North, but Kull comes from the West, out of the sea, from a newer world, an island continent the mountains of which are upstart and out-thrust, “brutal and terrible with youth, even as Kull.” An outcast but also an outrider, the Atlantean’s behavior often resembles that of an adolescent among the aged–or an American among Europeans, as Howard pits “a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain” against “a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity.” The “palaces and the temples and the shrines” of the City of Wonders speak to the new king as the Forum, the Parthenon, the Latin Quarter, and Westminster Abbey have spoken of unmatchable antiquity and atmospherics to so many sensitive Americans. While Kull’s curriculum vitae, which includes stints as a pirate, an outlaw, a gladiator, and a mercenary, is not exactly that of an ingénue or innocent abroad, or even an Atlantean Yankee in what had been King Borna’s Court, it is worth noting that Mark Twain’s impatient, innovative Hank Morgan when first met seems “to move among the spectres and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity.” The people of Camelot deem Morgan to be visiting “from a far land of barbarians.” So after a Great War that outdid even Twain in indicting hereditary monarchy, after America had recently crossed an ocean to intervene in a quarrel between at least six empires, how could the New World and the Old do anything but collide in the heroic fantasy of a young and alert American? The old world reels down the road to ruin and forgetfulness. That’s the lake-king of
The Cat and the Skull
, he who also deduces that “the rot of civilization has not yet entered [Kull’s] soul.” In the Atlantean’s Valusian experiences as in the mythology of so many transatlantic encounters, instinct confronts intrigue, energy, ennui, and pragmatism, precedent.

In 1930 Howard looked back at 1914 in his piece
A Touch of Trivia
, recalling that he had “firmly [thrown] in my lot with the Allies and thereafter remained loyal,” and stressing “We all felt then a friendship for France.” The City of Wonders is not necessarily the City of Lights, and the foreign soldiery, “men of Mu and of Kaa-u and of the hills of the east and the isles of the west,” saviors of Valusia who walk with “shoulders flung back” and inspect Kull “boldly and straightly” even as he inspects them, need not be seen as the American Expeditionary Force parading down the Champs d’Elysée. But with so many of even the verifiably human Valusians speaking with forked tongues, could there be a trace of what befell Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference in Kull beset by courtiers and conspirators? Had he lived and somehow been exposed to
The Shadow Kingdom
, Wilson, one of the preachiest presidents, might have nodded feelingly at Brule’s description of “the statecraft of the Seven Empires” as “a mazy, monstrous thing” or recognized the European diplomacy that hoodwinked and hamstrung him in Howard’s “masquerade where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask.” Is it a fetch too far to speculate that Howard might have been doing what gifted fantasists have been known to do, alluding without allegorizing? If so, if, once upon a time, these stories were entwined with that same time, they have emphatically not been entombed along with their period of origin.

But all such thoughts are at best marginalia scrawled in invisible ink, ghosts even more spectral than the many others thronging this series. “Shadow” and “shade” are sometime synonyms for “ghost,” and the rampant ghostliness of
The Shadow Kingdom
is made explicit by the title of its alter ego in Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs
: “The Phantom Empire.” Whether “Kingdom” or “Empire,” the tale can be approached as a ghost story in which a world of ghosts is disrupted, intruded upon, haunted, by the occasional living man. In a brilliant touch, the specter of the murdered monarch Eallal fails even to notice Kull and Brule, as if they are the ghosts: “The phantom came straight on, giving them no heed; Kull shrank back as it passed them, feeling an icy breath like a breeze from the arctic snow.” Visions invade Kull’s mind “like ghosts flying unbidden from the whispering void of nonexistence,” and the tablet in
By This Axe I Rule!
is another kind of ghost, albeit stone and ultimately shatterable, that of “the primal law makers” haunting and thwarting the lovers Ala and Seno val Dor.

To live is sooner or later to outlive oneself, to be a ghost. Kull the king has outlived the earlier self who harried the Pictish Isles and “laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlantean sea,” and in
Kings of the Night
he briefly outlives his entire era, prompting the Norseman Wulfhere’s question “Shall a ghost lead living men?” Once returned to his own time, Kull discloses that he has just “fought for the king of a strange shadow-people” and is left with even more divided loyalties when it comes to the real and the unreal: “All life and time and space seemed like a dream of ghosts to him, and he wondered thereat all the rest of his life.” A substantial amount of insubstantiality is characteristic of Howard’s fantasy–substantial, and substantiating; the gritty and the ghostly reinforce each other in his pages. Just as Kull’s confusion about his own identity and authenticity serve to shore up his identity and authenticity as one of the most unforgettable figures in heroic fantasy, his creator’s insistence upon unreality and impermanence helps to solidify the reality and permanence of his achievement as a storyteller.

Another instance of phantasmal imagery in
The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune
merits our attention: “I can summon up a demon more savage than any in ghostland–by smiting you in the face.” Howard was most likely inspired by one of the most famous of Shakespearean exchanges, from Act III of
Henry IV, Part One
, a play he knew well:

But it is a different play that haunts–if the reader will tolerate the overuse of that verb a final time–the Kull stories. Himself the scion of a family steeped in Shakespeare, the eminent fantasist Fritz Leiber was the first to point out that Kull is a Macbeth figure. The Scottish usurper is to Duncan as Kull is to Borna, and Macbeth’s insight once he has done murder to don majesty in Act III, Scene 1–“To be thus is nothing./But to be safely thus–” is even more valid for Kull, who has rather more than just the words of some weird sisters to worry about. Howard establishes a Macbethian mood for the series with the first two sentences of the
Exile
story, in which the sun sets and “a last crimson glory” appears atop the snowy peaks “like a crown of blood.” Where life for Macbeth is “but a walking shadow; a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more,” Kull perceives Valusia as “a kingdom of the shadows, ruled by phantoms who glided back and forth behind the painted curtains, mocking the futile king who sat upon the throne–himself a shadow.” Another presence in the stories is a fellow American as well as a fellow poet: Poe contributes epigraphs for
The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune
and
Kings of the Night
, and the passivity of his
Silence: A Fable
may have provoked the hyperkineticism of
The Screaming Skull of Silence
. Howard was a superb writer in part because he was a superb reader; he stole from the best and then transcended the thefts by transmuting the swag.

Kull’s first words in his first Weird Tales appearance are “The army is like a sword, and must not be allowed to rust,” but Valusia’s military might risk doing so in the ensuing stories, with the exception of the Picts and Red Slayers who accompany the king beyond the sunrise. We hear that Kull’s reign got off to a martial start as he broke the back of a Triple Federation and smashed the marauding Grondarians, but we don’t get to watch. When he declares “My right hand is stronger to defend than all Grondar is to assail!” the Grondarians display an ability to learn from experience but disappoint us by backing down. It is essential that writers of epic and/or heroic fantasy develop some of the skills of war correspondents and military historians, and fortunately Howard’s breakthrough would come with the last story in this volume,
Kings of the Night
, which finally turns Kull loose on a battlefield, albeit in a fight and an age not his own. In a March 1930 letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, the Texan confided “[
Kings
] was rather a new line for me, as I described a pitched battle. However, I think I handled it fairly well.” He was still pleased in September of 1930: “Some ways this story is the best I ever wrote. Nothing very weird about it, but good battle-stuff, if I do say so myself.” So
Kings
is noteworthy not only for its summit conference between Kull and Bran Mak Morn, but because it gives Howard a bigger budget and thousands of extras to maneuver on the page, thereby making possible the epic Crusader and Conan-commanded clashes yet to be written.

The hope here has been that newcomers to Kull or Howard will entertain the possibility that, like one of Tuzun Thune’s mirrors, heroic fantasy can contain much more than just “hard shallowness”–at times, “gigantic depths loom up,” as with the serpent-men, who have never been bettered, despite all the alien and android fifth columns that followed, as a worst fear made cold flesh. (Like our own reptilian underbrains, they have been here all along.) But readers can entertain this, that, or the other thing at a later date. Now it is high time that they themselves were entertained, enthralled, even enchanted, and this book, in which the young Robert E. Howard finds his way to, and through, an old, old world, is equal to the task. Despite conspiracies serpentine or byzantine, despite all the ghosts and shadows of Kulls past and Cataclysms to come, the pages that follow prove that it remains passing brave, and surpassingly splendid, to be a king, and ride in triumph through the City of Wonders.

Steve Tompkins
2006

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

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

The sun was setting. A last crimson glory filled the land and lay like a crown of blood on the snow sprinkled peaks. The three men who watched the death of the day breathed deep the fragrance of the early wind which stole up out of the distant forests, and then turned to a task more material. One of the men was cooking venison over a small fire and this man, touching a finger to the smoking viand, tasted with the air of a connoisseur.