Light years from Earth, a space ship called the Euphrates comes to life after decades of slumber. It wakes its passengers: clones of the greatest leaders of Earth’s history, genetically modified to never age. They look out their windows on the star Helos, and the hundreds of planets, inhabited by simple hunter-gatherers, that circle it. Armed only with their wits and a database of knowledge about human history, they will set forth to rebuild civilization, and perhaps this time avoid the dark fate of Earth. Danger and glory await them in their 10,000-year quest to create the greatest worlds in the galaxy. They are…THE GOD KINGS OF HELOS
Saladin of Ard, as he would come to be called, did not, could not, remember the fight for Jerusalem that happened on Earth a thousand years before he was born. Cloning doesn’t work that way, no matter what the fiction from Earth suggested. His genitor—the historical figure whose DNA he carried—was no more than a name in a database to him.
But somewhere in Saladin’s DNA was the seed of that fight, the fortitude that carried his genitor, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub—Saladin for short—to glory against the Crusader Kingdom that the Europeans had created in Earth’s Middle East region. In each of his cells, there was something that called Saladin to reclaim what is holy, to reject the rule of the invading barbarians, no matter how long they had been in power. This he knew, this he would remember.
Saladin of Ard knew of Islam from the Encycle, the database of Earth’s history. He knew its adherents greeted each other by saying “peace be with you.” He also knew his genitor rarely saw peace in his lifetime.
And on the day he would depart the Euphrates, the star ship that had been both his home and his only parent for the first sixteen years of his life, as he looked from the ship’s launching bay onto the single massive super-continent of planet H-19—and then to his left and right at the seven other clones whose eyes danced across the territory greedily—he suspected he himself would not see much peace in the hundred lifetimes to come either.
He was right.
The Euphrates’ landing pods wisely set the eight of them thousands of miles apart on the surface of H-19. Saladin found himself in territory his genitor would have felt right at home in: fertile floodplains on the shores of a mighty river, at the edge of a lonely desert.
He could have taught himself to farm from the Encycle and spread the knowledge to the desert nomads, entreating them to settle in one place with the promise of steady food. But the story of Jerusalem stayed with him. He did not want to build a civilization that simply fed the body. He dreamed of a world that fed the soul.
Saladin joined a desert tribe as a holy man. They taught him to survive and thrive while wandering the desert, a subject the Encycle had no entries on; he taught them to sing, and to pray. When they found food, he led them in giving thanks to the land. When the sandstorms came, he showed them how to ask forgiveness from the sky.
He did not believe that the land needed their gratitude nor that the sky needed their apologies. But he knew the nomads needed to express the feelings that were too big to keep inside, a way to make peace with the things that were beyond their control. And he knew that they would come back to him if he gave them the means to do so.
There were at first many gods in the world that he taught them to call Ard (a name he thought a bit more inspiring than H-19). The sky, the earth, the river, Helos itself—each had its own spirit, he told them. It was easier, at first, for the nomads to understand and worship the things they could see. Many years passed before Saladin decided they were ready to see how the holy could be unseen, everywhere, all powerful.
When he brought them the message of the One True God, the one who would have no others before Himself, he also brought them a gift from their new God. He had labored in secret for months, spending weeks at a time wandering the desert alone on “vision quests.”
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From Moses, he borrowed the message on the mountain top. But instead of descending with stone tablets, Saladin brought down the bronze axe. Conveniently, the mountain he had brought the tribe to for this seminal event could be mined for the necessary minerals. They settled in the mountain’s evening shadow.
The mountain he named Sinai; the settlement, Mecca.
In the beginning, the holy axe, and the new ones he taught the settlers to make, were only tools; he would teach them the other use of the axe soon enough. The sparse forests to the south of the settlement fell quickly, and the first buildings of Mecca were built with the lumber. First among these was a temple. Saladin knew it would be temporary, though: stone would eventually be needed to build a lasting monument to the One True God.
Until then, God needed a house so that people could come visit Him.
The nomads came to visit, and they stayed in Mecca to be near Him. But only so much fish could be taken from the river, and without the forests to forage, food became scarce in the dry season. Saladin called for the forges to stop making axes and start making scythes and plows. The people of Mecca had the tools to feed thousands before they had even learned to plant seeds.
Despite the technological advantage he brought them, Saladin struggled to promulgate agriculture for decades. To describe his vision of fields of the same plant, pastures filled with just one animal, towers filled with a single kind of grain, to the simplest of hunter-gatherers…well, he may as well have told them about the spaceship he’d arrived on.
But each year the fields stretched farther, and the food supplies grew a bit. Each year, Mecca had more to give away to the nomads who came to visit the temple of the One True God. And each year, a few more believed the harvest would come again, and stayed.
Of course, some started to come just for the free food, and went on their way again. The One True God didn’t speak to everyone. But they took tales of Mecca with them. Throughout the flood plains, for hundreds of miles in every direction, the stories spread of a place where animals walked passively to slaughter, where there were huts filled not with people but with food.
Saladin liked to believe it was not a religious pilgrim who planned the first raid on Mecca. He hoped the stories had spread to barbarians who had never visited the holy city. He wanted to believe no one could look on Mecca in peace and not care whether it lived or died. But he would never know for sure.
The raiders came in the night with wooden spears and clubs. The poor shepherd whose goats were taken escaped with just a gash below one eye from a thrown rock. He had been knocked unconscious, and the raiders left him unharmed.
Hungry cowards, Saladin thought, but not killers. Still, a message would have to be sent.
It was time teach a new use for the bronze axe.
Saladin idly wondered in the months to come which entry from the Encycle applied to the Axemen he trained and armored: Police, Posse, perhaps Militia. They had once been farmers and shepherds, and perhaps would be again. They were devout followers of the One True God. They didn’t protect the citizenry exactly, for the line between a resident of Mecca and a visitor was as blurry as the boundaries of the settlement itself. They enforced only one holy law, no matter the perpetrator or victim: Thou Shalt Not Steal.
Their first captain was a former shepherd with a scar under one eye.
Saladin himself cut off the hand off the first thief they caught, on the steps of the great temple of the One True God. They had killed the first group of raiders, splitting skulls with the bronze axe just as they split the turtles of the great river to roast. Saladin quickly realized, however, that a dead thief was just one less thief. A thief with one hand, though—that was a message. That was a deterrent. That turned others away from the very idea of theft.
On the steps of the temple of the One True God, Saladin raised the Axe of the Covenant, as they had come to call it, over his head when pronouncing the sentence to the gathered crowd. Cleave away that which offends thee, he said, quoting the scripture he himself had written, before bringing the Axe down. The man screamed. Saladin told the priests of the temple not to wash the blood away from the steps for three days.
It was brutal, and it was the first day Saladin ruled not just as the messenger of the One True God’s love, but also as the hand of His wrath. Saladin looked forward to a day he could set aside corporal and capital punishment to keep his land safe. But the first costs of peace are always paid in blood.