Read Kull: Exile of Atlantis Online
Authors: Robert E. Howard
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Contents
Untitled Story (previously published as “Exile of Atlantis”)
The Screaming Skull of Silence
The Black City (Unfinished Fragment)
The “Am-ra of the Ta-an” Fragments
Untitled and Unfinished Fragment
Untitled and Incomplete Fragment
Notes on the Original Howard Texts
The Fully Illustrated Robert E. Howard Library from Del Rey Books
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 196
7
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”
There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness.
…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.