"Horse-faced is fine," Belem suddenly interjected. "If you can get a valuable alliance out of it, there’s still a benefit to marrying her."
He was suddenly reminded of his wife, the one with the pockmarked face. The marriage had gotten him nine of the Count of Blois’s manors in England.
"Maybe when my father was alive, but now?" Shansi said doubtfully.
"You’re the king now," Eric reminded him.
Of course, Eric didn’t believe he was actually a king. But Shansi did, so Eric played along.
Because it was amusing.
"Right!" Shansi said. "So someone will definitely want to marry Zahra, even if she’s not pretty!"
"Does she really look like a horse?" Eric asked with a smile.
"A long face. Her mother was an Egyptian," Shansi said, making a face. "But she’s not totally ugly. Besides, it’s time she was married; she’s about fifteen or sixteen! I think we should marry her off to the son of the Caliph of Cairo. That way, we can form an alliance with the Fatima Dynasty. He’ll help us deal with Tutush—oh, maybe they’re already on it.
Then we’ll have to make sure the Bedouin in Damascus don’t cause any trouble for us. And of course, we’ll need to get my father’s former subordinates under control and keep them from stirring things up."
"You’d have to, of course."
"Some of them are the very reason I became a slave in the first place!" A smile spread across Shansi’s face.
Aziz, Shansi’s father, was a Turkic mercenary. From a young age, he served one master after another—from his own Turkic people to the Persians, Arabs, and Egyptians. His travels took him from Khorasan all the way to Egypt, and his infamous reputation was known far and wide.
Many saw him as a hound of war who lived for riches and slaughter, a man who refused to be leashed. In reality, he was just unlucky. He could never stay in one place for long, as his employers would inevitably conspire to have his mercenary company destroyed just to avoid paying their hefty wages.
Thus, he was forced to use his curved saber and bow and arrow to claim the payment he was owed. He and his men fought, paying in blood and even their lives—it was what they had earned. In his twenty years as a mercenary, Aziz learned that this was a truth the world was reluctant to acknowledge.
And so, that year, not yet forty, Aziz was at the height of his power. He seized Damascus, the former heart of the Arab Empire and the jewel of Fatima’s territory in Syria. It was the capital of Syria.
Aziz even declared himself King of Syria. It was an arrogant claim, but in the chaotic political landscape of Syria and Palestine at the time, one could have declared oneself king of the moon for all it mattered.
The Fatima Dynasty had been in decline for the better part of half a century, and Turkic adventurers from the East had poured into the land like a tidal wave.
They scorned the authority of any caliph and swore fealty to no secular Sultan. Whether in Cairo, Isfahan, or Baghdad, these were nothing more than hollow names to them.
They fought only for their own gain and desires, letting the political storms rage as they would.
And Aziz was the most prominent among them. In less than a decade, he had brought these disparate Turkic Warlords under his banner, forcing them to act in his name. Across the lands from Jerusalem to Aleppo—two-thirds of the Levant—he built a powerful, if unstable, Turkic Duchy with Damascus at its heart and himself as its Commander-in-Chief.
Had the Fatima Grand Vizier, Jamil, not bribed Aziz’s subordinates with money, leading to Aziz’s crushing defeat, and had Tutush—the very man Aziz sought help from—not turned on him and had him strangled, the fate of Syria might have been very different.
After Aziz was strangled, his loyal followers quickly spirited Shansi out of Damascus, sending him toward Tripoli. However, the ruler of Tripoli had already surrendered to Tutush. The moment the guards heard them mention Aziz’s name, they were all seized.
And all of them were made slaves.
"Why didn’t they kill you?" Eric asked.
"Yilji should have killed me," Shansi admitted cheerfully. "But he didn’t know who I was at first, and by the time he found out, he wasn’t in the mood to kill me. So he kicked me a few times and said I was to be his slave. He liked watching me empty his chamber pot. I was a house slave, you see? It’s another form of humiliation."
"A house slave?"
"Women’s work," Shansi explained. "But it also meant I spent all day with the girls. I didn’t mind that part."
"Then how did you escape Yilji and end up in Hama?" Stephen chimed in, intrigued by the Turkic man’s manner of speaking.
"I didn’t escape. A slave trader bought me. Paid a high price for me, too!" Shansi said, sounding quite proud of the fact.
"Was that slave trader planning to sell you to Tutush?" Eric asked.
"Oh, no! He was going to sell me to the Shiite Sufi practitioners in Baalbek!" Shansi pointed to the five old men in black robes beside him. "You see, they had already agreed on a price, but the slave trader wanted more money. Then we ran into some men from Damascus. They actually recognized me—I guess I’m just destined to stand out. Of course, those Damascenes didn’t want the deal to go through.
He wanted to take me back to Damascus, and the slave trader didn’t dare cross Tutush. So we were all as good as dead—until you showed up."
After speaking with the five old men in black robes and questioning Shansi further, Eric was able to piece together the rest of the story.