O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
Spinoza handed a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s to Harvey, who had
been sitting quietly on the couch the whole time. The monkey then
took a long sip from his own glass and sighed.
He would certainly miss his new friends. He wondered if
Armageddon applied to monkeys too.
CHAPTER 39
Windswept and dusty plains spread out to a perfect circular horizon.
There was little to see, other than a surreal and monolithic
emptiness, yet Genghis Khan, the greatest conqueror in the history of
the world still scanned the plains for hours on end. It was this
distillation of categories down to only earth and heavens that allowed
him easier audience with the one and only deity—Tengri, god of the
sky. Having tolerance and respect for other religions, he felt that it
was this simplicity of landscape that prompted the world’s desert-
dwellers to perceive that God is one, yet separate and looming. The
Hebrews, the Muslims and the Zoroastrians had all discovered this
too, only they buried the truth in self-serving dogmas.
Many saw him as a greedy imperialist, obsessed only with
amassing the riches of the earth, but that was an ignorant accusation.
His conquests had little to do with material gain, except as a means
to fund future expansion of the empire. No, Tengri had placed him on
earth for the sole purpose of uniting the world, dissolving its
boundaries and uniting the earth under the sky. His phenomenal
success so far had only proved this; China, Mongolia, Central Asia,
Turkestan and Southern Russia had already fallen under his
juggernaut. There was no doubt that Tengri had been guiding his
mighty hand.
Genghis had been preparing his horde for an advance over the
Central Asia steppe into Southern Russia, for his first attack on
Christian civilization, the Gregorians. Tonight however, he was
troubled, and felt the need to be alone with the plains, and with
Tengri.
For the first time that he could remember, his own mortality
weighed heavy on him. God, the plains, the stars, and the seas would
all go on existing as they had always, whereas Genghis knew that he
himself would not. He held no illusions about this. People rarely lived
past forty, and he knew that he could not keep up this torturous pace
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