† The speech has been passed on to later generations in an epic poem commissioned by his son, who wasn’t born in a saddle and could eat with a knife and fork. It began:
“See yonder the stolid foemen slumber
Fat with stolen gold, corrupt of mind.
Let the spears of your wrath be as the steppe fire on a
windy day in the dry season,
Let your honest blade thrust like the horns of
a five-year old yok with severe toothache….”
And went on for three hours. Reality, which can’t usually afford to pay poets, records that in fact the entire speech ran:
“Lads, most of them are still in bed, we should go through them like kzak fruit through a short grandmother, and I for one have had it right up to here with yurts, okay?”