Shadhi ibn Marwan

Shirkuh is the one who has never much cared what the room thought.

They are Kurds, both of them, sons of a man named Shadhi ibn Marwan, and their family's road to this citadel on the Tigris has been long and switchbacked in the way that so many roads were long and switchbacked in that fractured century.

Their origins lie further north and east, in the hill country around Diyarbakir, in the borderlands where the Kurdish highlands meet the Armenian Plateau, a landscape of stone villages and grazing flocks entirely unlike the flat river plain on which Tikrit sits.

Shadhi had left that country to seek his fortune in the service of greater men, as ambitious men of modest birth so often did, in an age when the old order of the Great Seljuk Empire was crumbling into a scatter of rival principalities, atabegs, and garrison commanders, each carving out what authority he could from the wreckage of a unified caliphate that existed now more in name than in fact.