Kull: Exile of Atlantis (45 page)

And while Brule hesitated, unnerved, and Kull halted in undecided amazement Thulses Doom stepped through the door and vanished before their very eyes.

“At least, Kull,” said Ka-nanu later, “You have won your first tilt with the Skull-faced one, as he admitted. Next time we must be more wary, for he is a fiend incarnate–an owner of magic black and unholy. He hates you for he is a satellite of the great serpent whose power you broke; he has the gift of illusion and of invisibility, which only he posseses. He is grim and terrible.”

“I fear him not.” said Kull, “The next time I will be prepared and my answer shall be a sword thrust, even though he be unslayable, which thing I doubt. Brule did not find his vitals, which even a living being dead man must have, that is all.”

Then turning to Tu,

“Lord Tu, it would seem that the civilized races also have their tambus, since the blue lake is forbidden to all save myself.”

Tu answered testily, angry because Kull had given the happy Delcardes permission to marry whom she desired:

“My lord, that is no heathen tambu such your tribe bows to; it is a matter of state-craft, to preserve peace between Valusia and the lake-beings who are magicians.”

“And we keep tambus so as not to offend unseen spirits of tigers and eagles.” said Kull, “And therein I see no difference.”

“At any rate,” said Tu, “You must beware of Thulses Doom; for he vanished into another dimension and as long as he is there he is invisible and harmless to us, but he will come again.”

“Ah, Kull,” sighed the old rascal, Ka-nanu, “Mine is a hard life compared to yours; Brule and I were drunk in Zarfhaana and I fell down a flight of stairs, most damnably bruising my shins. And all the while you lounged in sinful ease on the silk of the kingship, Kull.”

Kull glared at him wordlessly and turned his back, giving his attention to the drowsing Saremes.

“She is not a wizard-beast, Kull,” said the Spear-slayer, “She is wise but she merely looks her wisdom and does not speak. Yet her eyes fascinate me with their antiquity. A mere cat, just the same.”

“Still, Brule,” said Kull, admiringly, stroking her silky fur, “Still, she is a very ancient cat, very.”

The King and the Oak
(Draft)

Before the shadows of the night before the dawn lay dead

King Kull rode out of Kolderkon to make a king a bed;

Oh, bitter was the couch he made, doom black and ghastly red.

Before the shadows slew the sun the kites were soaring free

And Kull rode down the forst road, his red sword at his knee;

And winds were whispering ’round the world: “King Kull rides to the sea.”

The sun died crimson in the sea, the long grey shadows fell,

The moon rose like a silver skull that wrought a demon’s spell

For in its light great trees stood up like specters out of Hell.

In spectral light the trees stood up inhuman monsters dim,

Kull thought each trunk a living shape, each branch a knotted limb,

And strange unmortal evil eyes flamed terribly at him.

The branches writhed like knotted snakes, they beat against the night,

And one great oak with swayings stiff stupendous in his sight,

Tore up its roots and blocked his way, grim in the ghostly light.

They grappled in the forest way, the king and grisly oak;

Its great limbs bent him in their grip, but never a word was spoke;

And useless in his iron hand, his stabbing dagger broke.

And all about the frenzied king, there sang a dim refrain

Frought deep with seven million years of evil, hate and pain:

“We were the lords ere man had come, and shall be lords again.”

At dawn the king with bloody hands strove ’gainst a silent tree;

As from a drifting dream he woke; a wind blew down the lea,

And Kull of high Atlantis rode silent to the sea.

Appendices

A
TLANTEAN
G
ENESIS
by Patrice Louinet

Between 1926 and 1930, Robert E. Howard began thirteen stories featuring Kull, Atlantean king of Valusia, completing ten. However only three of those tales saw print in Howard’s lifetime:
The Shadow Kingdom
(Weird Tales, August 1929),
The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune
(Weird Tales, September 1929), and
Kings of the Night
(Weird Tales, November 1930), the last a Bran Mak Morn story co-starring the Atlantean king.

These three stories were particularly well received by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright and by the readers, if the commentaries found in the magazine’s letters section (sometimes years after the stories had appeared) are any indication. Howard Phillips Lovecraft held these stories in very high esteem and even suggested in a 1934 letter that Howard write more tales about the character. Howard replied, in his deceptively deprecatory tone: “Thanks for the kind things you said about the Kull stories, but I doubt if I’ll ever be able to write another. The three stories I wrote about that character seemed almost to write themselves, without any planning on my part; there was no conscious effort on my part to work them up. They simply grew up, unsummoned, full grown in my mind and flowed out on paper from my finger tips. To sit down and consciously try to write another story on that order would be to produce something the artificiality of which would be apparent.”

Howard’s stories, at least all the major ones, required much more work and elaboration than the Texan was willing to concede, and the Kull series was no exception. For instance, Howard worked on the second Kull story for over a year. But when he was telling Lovecraft that he was unable to write a Kull story anymore, Howard was probably telling the truth. He had started to lose his grip on the character by 1929 and had discarded him completely after a series of false starts and unsold stories. In 1932, Howard had recycled one of the last-written Kull stories–
By This Axe I Rule!
–in order to create a new series, centering around a certain grim Cimmerian warrior. The two characters have little in common except their imposing physiques, but the background for the two series is similar: barbarian characters evolving in kingdoms or empires from earth’s mythical past, confronted, in one way or another, by decaying civilizations–Kull by his adopted country, Conan by the Hyborian kingdoms. Conan had replaced Kull, and Howard found it impossible to write about a character who no longer represented a vehicle through which he could express his ideas.

What Howard was unaware of, in spite of the unusual critical praise these three stories received over the years, was that he had given birth to a new subgenre of literature, since dubbed “Heroic Fantasy,” “Epic Fantasy,” or “Sword and Sorcery”–denominations as unsatisfying as they are reductive. The mixing of historical (or pseudo-historical) elements with elements of fantasy was nothing new; on the contrary it harked back to the very beginnings of literature. What Howard brought to the form was to modernize it, getting rid of the chivalrous aspects, flowery language, and stilted personalities, writing violent tales in a realistic style that reflected Howard’s environment and that of his readership. Critic George Knight once argued very convincingly, “Because his most popular creations are his fantasy tales, Howard is put into the category of ‘fantasy writer,’ yet…the most interesting aspect of his fiction is not the fantasy but the realism–a realism springing from Howard’s class, environment, beliefs, and the age in which he wrote.”

The Kull stories (and this is also true for the Conan series) are thus “realistic fantasy tales.” Unlike his predecessors and unlike the immense majority of his successors, Howard set his stories in universes not so much imaginary as they are forgotten: he wrote about our world and his themes are universal ones. Kull’s serpent-men-infected Valusia is no more fantastic than Shakespeare’s ghost-haunted Elsinore, yet who would think of labeling Hamlet as “Sword and Sorcery”?

In 1932, when he initiated his Conan series, Howard wrote an essay,
The Hyborian Age
, which explains how this particular phase of mankind’s past has now been forgotten. In a letter sent with the essay, Howard explained his need for realism in writing fantasy stories: “Nothing in this article is to be considered as an attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history. It is simply a fictional background for a series of fiction-stories. When I began writing the Conan series a few years ago, I prepared this ‘history’ of his age in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness.”

Interestingly enough the essay begins with the destruction of what was Kull’s universe:

Known history begins with the waning of the Pre-Cataclysmic civilization, dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia, Valusia, Verulia, Grondar, Thule, and Commoria. These peoples spoke a similar language, arguing a common origin. […] The barbarians of that age were the Picts, who lived on islands far out on the western ocean; the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continent between the Pictish Islands and the main, or Thurian Continent; and the Lemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the eastern hemisphere. […] Then the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and the Pictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new continent. Sections of the Thurian Continent vanished under the waves, or sinking, formed great inland lakes and seas. Volcanoes broke forth and terrific earthquakes shook down the shining cities of the empires. Whole nations were blotted out. (
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian,
Del Rey, 2003, pp. 381–382) [Incidentally, the word “Thurian,” describing Kull’s continent, was coined in 1932; it never appears in any of the Kull stories.]

By retroactively integrating Kull’s world to Conan’s (giving a few details as to its geography and history), by showing the destruction of Kull’s world and how it was eventually replaced by Conan’s, by explaining how the Atlanteans ultimately became the Cimmerians (hence that Conan could be a descendant of Kull) and, last but not least, by writing the first Conan tale on the ashes of an unsold Kull story, Howard was telling us that he now envisioned the Kull series a prehistoric one, which paved the way for the Conan stories. The Thurian continent belonged to the past of the Hyborian world–and of Howard’s career–just as the Hyborian world belongs to our past. Having distanced himself from Kull, Howard had placed himself in a position which prevented him from writing new Kull tales, having obliterated the character and his universe in the meantime.

Considering the Kull series only as an archaic version of Conan is paying them a substantial disservice. Howard’s readers and critics were certainly right to disagree with the author in this matter, for the Kull stories are those in which Howard was creating a new genre of fiction as he was writing the stories, playing with a universe that was definitely not as systematized as Conan’s, and toying with the various possibilities this new genre could offer. While all the Conan stories were penned with Weird Tales in mind, the Kull stories were submitted to a variety of different magazines; some may read like prototypical Conan stories, some as prose poems, some as philosophical fables. Howard let his imagination run free. It was a time of experimentation: the Kull stories range far and wide and can be very different between one story and the next.

The genesis of the stories of the Atlantean king is also that of the genre Howard was inventing.

______

In his
A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard
, which originally appeared in 1935, Alvin Earl Perry quoted from a now-lost letter from Howard. In that letter the Texan offered a few comments on the genesis of some of his characters. About Kull, he wrote that he “was put on paper the moment he was created…In fact he first appeared as only a minor character in a story which was never accepted. At least, he was intended to be a minor character, but I had not gone far before he was dominating the yarn.”

The only extant story that fits the description is the first tale of this book, previously published under the title
Exile of Atlantis
. This short vignette, in which Kull is but one of three lead characters and is indeed soon “dominating the yarn” is the only Kull story that was written before
The Shadow Kingdom
. It was thus the first Kull story, but at the same time it was also the last to feature one of Howard’s earliest creations, Am-ra, whose origins will help us understand the genesis of the Kull stories: Am-ra apparently played the same role for Kull that the Atlantean would later play for Conan.

Howard said he began buying pulp magazines at fifteen, in the summer of 1921, though he had probably been reading them for some time. His favorite publications seem to have been Adventure and Argosy, the two leading pulp fiction magazines of that era. Before Weird Tales began publication in 1923, there was no magazine devoted solely to weird fiction. The young Howard was a voracious reader of adventure fiction, an inclination that would be true all his life. Argosy and Adventure specialized in historical and adventure tales, and traces of influence of all the major contributors to those magazines–we may cite Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur D. Howden-Smith–can be detected in the writings of Howard. It was thus natural that when Howard began writing fiction on a (more or less) professional basis in 1921, just after having discovered these magazines, it was in these authors that he found his first inspiration. The Texan thus wrote a number of tales clearly derived from Mundy, and borrowed from Burroughs or, at a later date, from Lamb and Howden-Smith.