The first scouts came from the east nearly a thousand years after Saladin had descended to the surface of Ard. Saladin had accomplished much in that time, given that the people he had found in the desert were little more than hairless apes fresh off the trees. Mecca thrived in the shadow of mighty Sinai. The armories were full of shining axes and armor, and the wealthy elites of the city gaudied themselves in bronze jewelry twisted into stylish shapes.
The non-elites started having just a shitload of children because they realized kids were the cheapest labor they could get for their growing farms.
The scouts that came from the east spoke not of a king, not of a council, not of a god, but of a man they called the First Warrior. The First Warrior is coming, they said. He ruled not by divine right, not by wisdom, not the consent of the governed, but by right of conquest. The lands of the east belonged to him, they said, because he had taken them. There were no more tribes to conquer in the east, so west he would come, and his Horde with him.
The First Warrior of the Horde, they called him. The First, sometimes. Never a name. He speaks his own name, they said, but it belongs to him alone. He kills any other man that would dare place it in his mouth.
The captain of Saladin’s guard befriended one of the scouts after besting him in single combat (proving, to the delight of the scouting party, that the people of Mecca were fierce enough to be worthy of conquest). Covered in each other’s blood, the two walked into a tavern, arms around each other’s shoulders like old friends, and demolished a cask of grain alcohol. And late in the night, in a dark corner of the tavern, in a whisper that could barely be heard above the other drunk soldiers, the scout spoke the unspeakable name of the First Warrior of the Horde as love and terror battled for control across his face….
Khan.
Saladin considered killing or capturing the scouts. It would do little good, though. More would come, and they would not be so bold as this party, fighting, drinking and whoring while boasting of the conquests of the Horde. Anyone could slip into the city unnoticed if they tried. Travelers came in and out of Mecca all the time, and the Axemen couldn’t screen them all to find spies. Saladin sent the scouts off with a fine bronze helm as a gift to their leader, and an open invitation to visit the holy city of the One True God in peace.
Saladin learned from the Encycle that Genghis Khan’s was the first DNA sample to be reconstructed by the Cradle Coalition, the international effort that built the Euphrates as a last, desperate hope to save human civilization from the fall of Earth. Khan’s DNA was relatively easy to reconstruct, apparently, because one out of every two hundred men on Earth was a direct descendant of his. Khan of Earth raped his way across that planet’s largest continent while conquering it and building an empire spanning half the world’s population.
It seemed somewhat unlikely to Saladin that Khan of Helos would visit Saladin’s holy city in peace. Or in chastity, for that matter.
A messenger came from the east not long after the scouts departed. Saladin was somewhat surprised to see that the messenger carried an actual handwritten letter. The Horde may have been barbarians, but they were literate barbarians. Khan was already cultivating the practices that would help him manage his growing empire.
To His Holiness, the “Sultan” of Mecca:
Greetings from Khan, the First Warrior of the Horde. My scouts report to me the beauty of your fine river village and the martial skill of your shepherd militia. Congratulations on what I am sure was a pleasurable millennium of eating the grasses I feed to my horse and bowing down before an invisible man.
You may have heard of our many conquests, but you need not fear. Many slaves of the Horde are worshippers of the One True God, or at least were before we enslaved them. It is not in the Horde’s interest to sack a holy city and spark a slave rebellion. We are, after all, running out places to put dead slaves’ bodies.
The First thanks you for the extraordinary bronze helm you have given in tribute. All we ask in return for continued peace is 9,999 more just like it, and axes to match.
Your god may keep his little village, if you render unto Khan that which is Khan’s.
Saladin responded the very same day:
Dearest Khan, your messenger carries with him all that which is Khan’s in the city of the One True God.
Saladin’s Axemen stripped the messenger naked, carved the message into his back, and sent him stumbling out of the city eastward, still bleeding.
Mecca watched its eastern borders carefully in the months to come.
The intelligence gathered from escaped slaves of the Horde and others suggested Mecca could expect to see tens of thousands of screaming warriors on the eastern horizon. They would come in the night. Archers would rain down arrows on the first men to respond to any alarms. Then the Horde would pour through the streets of the city killing, raping, and eating the populace, in that order.
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The Horde would eat anyone that took up arms against them within the city. This was not worshipful of human flesh, nor about consuming the “power” of others. It was desecration. The Horde’s final insult to any who would dare oppose them was to turn them into shit.
Ten thousand soldiers don’t just appear out of nowhere, though. The vanguard came first and set up two encampments, lightly fortified, within a day’s march of Mecca. Raiding parties collected food and slaves from the countryside nearby, though they became a bit shier about harrying local farmers when they found small platoons of Axemen guarding certain farms. As was their practice with any other thieves, the Axemen Saladin had stationed at the outlying farms cut off the Hordesmen’s right hands and sent them on their way.
Saladin received a burlap bag full of left hands from Khan. And again, a handwritten note.
Dearest Saladin, you may keep these as well. Their owners have no use for them, because I have no use for a soldier that can be captured alive.
I am disappointed your Axemen lack the resolve to kill. I had hoped at least a few of my lesser soldiers would die while sacking your city, to add to the glory of our conquest and sharpen our ranks, but it seems the few true warriors among you are squeamish about taking life.
Perhaps when I take your city, I will cut off the cocks of every Axeman’s father for the crime of siring such a weak-willed son.
The Horde column soon started its march from the east to the encampments. Saladin’s spies reported the archers were well equipped. Their bodies were warped and asymmetric from a lifetime of training with their powerful bows, and their slaves carried hundreds of arrows. It was one of the highest stations a Horde slave could attain to stand at the side of an archer in battle, knocking arrows to be fired one after another by his master.
The Horde infantry’s main weapon was fear. Fear of their overwhelming numbers. Fear of their battle cries. Fear of their brutality. Fear of their war crimes. But their actual weapons were little more than heavy rocks and pointy sticks, their armor merely animal hides.
To Saladin’s surprise and relief, there were no cavalry. Khan surely knew of his genitor’s famed horse archers. Perhaps he had not yet had success domesticating the animals. Perhaps he had, and they were deployed elsewhere. Either way, Mecca was the better for it.
Open conflict, Saladin reasoned, would have been glorious but brief. Mecca’s fortifications were light, having never had to face an organized army before. No time to improve them before the masses descended.
Saladin believed in his Axemen’s superior arms and training, but they numbered little more than two thousand. They could perhaps hold off the Horde infantry, who outnumbered them a paltry three-to-one. But without the means to defend themselves from archers, they would drown in the rain of arrows.
Saladin gambled Mecca’s future on the only hope he had. On the day of reckoning, he went to the top of Sinai alone, to pray.
The Horde column approached, ten men wide and a thousand ranks long, stretching over a mile. They began their split, three thousand infantry and two thousand archers each, to the two vanguard encampments to the north and south of Sinai, on the eastern outskirts of Mecca. As they did, the war call began: ten thousand fists beat against ten thousand chests. Ten thousand voices thundered a HO sound, in perfect rhythm and unison to their steps. It was said afterward that in Mecca, a still pot of water would ripple from the sound.
Perhaps some of the Hordesmen, as they grunted and beat their chests, noticed the fire lit atop the mountain, from the sacred space where Saladin the Holy was said to have spoken to the burning bush. But they would not know what that fire meant until it was too late.
As the first bloom of smoke floated into the sky, Saladin’s Axemen charged forth from their hiding places far to the east of the city, a thousand to each encampment. Saladin himself had stood atop the mount with a torch, and waited until the infantry had begun making camp to give the signal. Khan’s archers, positioned strategically to the rear for the approach to Mecca, were left unprotected from the flanking maneuver.
The Meccan Axemen washed them away like the springtime floods of the mighty river.
Saladin had emptied the city of Axemen. Had Khan chosen to approach the city directly instead of making camp for the night, he would not have found a single soldier defending it.
Attacking from the rear, the Axemen began their slaughter of the Horde archers nearly a half mile from each of the Horde’s encampments. A few archers took aim where they could, but they would surely hit as many of their own comrades as they would the Meccan defenders if they fired.
By the time word reached the Horde camps of what was happening in the back of the column, it was far too late, and caused more harm than good. The panicking, bloodthirsty Horde infantry trampled many of the archers on their way to meet the Axemen. The few that managed to make it to the back of the column straggled up nearly single file. They had winded themselves running over a thousand yards after a full day of marching, and were easy pickings for the Axemen.
When the Axemen had swept through the majority of the Horde archers, Saladin signaled their planned retreat, dumping straw into the signal fire to make black smoke.
The Axemen saw the signal, stopped their slaughter where they stood, rallied to their standards, and marched double-time back to Mecca as if they had just finished a physical training exercise. The Horde infantry gave chase, but couldn’t keep up with the well-fed, well-rested, well-trained troops.
Mecca had lost less than a hundred men and killed over three thousand Horde archers.
The Axemen waited at the city limits for the Horde charge that night, but it never came. The remainder of Khan’s troops began to march east the very next day. The column was much shorter this time.
A small party of Axemen was sent to each abandoned Horde encampment to search for any supplies, or guerrillas, that Khan might have left. Saladin was summoned to see what they found in the northern encampment.
It was a pile of human shit, and a note. In Khan’s handwriting.
Dearest Saladin, here lie the remains of your fallen Axemen. They were sinewy and few, but invigorating. We will be back for seconds.
I have underestimated you once. It will not happen again. When we return, we will pile your digested remains in Mecca until they bury the temple of that god you imagined, and on the peak of that pile I will shit out the turd that was once your heart.
Until then, please keep your body healthy for me. I am trying to watch my cholesterol.
Saladin ordered the mound of excrement to be covered over with rocks, and swore the Axemen to secrecy about what they had seen.
Later, he consecrated the site. It would thereafter be called the Holy Sepulcher of the Unknown Solider.