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.
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 spectr
al 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:
Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
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.
“All ready, Kull–Gor-na–let us eat.”
The speaker was young–little more than a boy. A tall, slim-waisted, broad-shouldered lad who moved with the easy grace of a leopard. Of his companions, one was an older man, a powerful, massively built hairy man, with an aggressive face. The other was a counterpart of the speaker, except for the fact that he was slightly larger–taller, a thought deeper of chest and broader of shoulder. He gave the impression, even more than the first youth, of dynamic speed concealed in long, smooth muscles.
“Good,” said he, “I am hungry.”
“When were you ever otherwise?” jeered the first speaker.
“When I am fighting,” Kull answered seriously.
The other shot a quick glance at his friend as to fathom his inmost mind; he was not always sure of his friend.
“And then you are blood hungry,” broke in the older man. “Am-ra, have done with your bantering and cut us food.”
Night began to fall; the stars blinked out. Over the shadowy hill country swept the dusk wind. Far off a tiger roared suddenly. Gor-na made a
n instinctive motion toward the flint pointed spear which lay beside him. Kull turned his head and a queer light flickered in his cold grey eyes.
“The striped brothers hunt tonight,” said he.
“They worship the rising moon.” Am-ra indicated the east where a red radiance was becoming evident.
“Why?” asked Kull. “The moon discovers them to their prey and their enemies.”
“Once, many hundreds of years ago,” said Gor-na, “a king tiger, pursued by hunters, called on the woman in the moon and she flung him down a vine whereby he climbed to safety and abode for many years in the moon. Since then, all the striped people worship the moon.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Kull bluntly. “Why should the striped people worship the moon for aiding one of their race who died so long ago? Many a tiger has scrambled up Death Cliff and escaped the hunters, but they do not worship that cliff. How should they know what took place so long ago?”
Gor-na’s brow clouded. “It little becomes you, Kull, to jeer at your elders or to mock the legends of your adopted people. This tale must be true because it has been handed down from generation unto generation longer than men remember. What always was, must always be.”