That Time Genghis Khan Fucked Around And Found Out About A Puppy

Let’s get one thing straight: Hassan-i Sabbah, the OG Old Man of the Mountain, was basically a Bond villain if Bond villains were perpetually stoned and ran a death cult out of a castle that was, by all accounts, fucking awesome. We’re talking secret gardens, fountains flowing with wine (allegedly), and a frankly shocking number of horny virgins just hanging out. According to Brother Bartholomew the Gobsmacked’s forbidden scrolls, the real treasure of Alamut castle wasn’t the library or the hashish plants, but a scruffy little terrier mix named ‘Stabby.’ Stabby was the light of Hassan’s life. He was also, unfortunately for everyone on the Eurasian landmass, directly in the path of Genghis Khan’s “conquer all the things” world tour, circa 1219-ish.

Now, the historical record—which I keep in a shoebox under my bed—is fuzzy on the details. Some say one of the Khan’s outriders mistook Stabby for a weird-looking marmot. Others claim the Great Khan himself, in a fit of pique after his horse got spooked, personally shot the dog with an arrow. All we know for sure is that word got back to Hassan-i Sabbah that his beloved woofer was now pushing up daisies in the middle of Persia. The man did not take it well. He gathered his Fida’i, his elite corps of brainwashed murder-machines, not for a holy war, but for what the minutes from the emergency meeting describe as “Operation: Fuck That Guy’s Entire Life Up.”

The goal wasn’t to kill Genghis Khan. Oh, no. That was for amateurs. This was to be death by a thousand papercuts. A campaign of psychological warfare so petty and so relentlessly annoying it would make the Son of Heaven question his own goddamn sanity. The Assassins, masters of stealth and infiltration, began their work. Genghis Khan would wake up to find his favourite warhorse had been given a truly unfortunate haircut. His most prized skull-goblet, filled to the brim with fermented mare’s milk, would be replaced with lukewarm goat piss. One week, every single arrow in the Mongol arsenal was mysteriously fletched backwards. It was tactical-grade gaslighting.

The Mongol generals, hard men who had stared down armies and sacked cities, were slowly losing their minds. They’d flinch at shadows. They’d check their boots for scorpions, only to find them full of marmalade. According to the apocryphal ‘Ledger of a Very Confused Quartermaster,’ morale had plummeted not because of casualties, but because someone kept stealing the left sandal of every pair in the entire camp. The final straw came at the siege of Samarkand. Genghis rose from his campaign bed to lead the final assault... only to find that every single pair of pants, trousers, and loincloths he owned had been replaced with a single, very itchy, child-sized burlap sack. He tried to rule from behind a desk for two weeks, but eventually, the sheer, ball-shrinking embarrassment proved too much. He died, not in a glorious battle, but of what court physicians diagnosed as “a terminal case of humiliation.” Hassan-i Sabbah, for his part, commissioned a life-sized statue of Stabby forged from the melted-down crowns of a dozen dead sultans. And lived happily ever after. The end.