Shiraz

Shiraz is a mystery. 

He understands many languages, is lethally accurate with a bow, skilled in stealth and devoted to Zahara. He is also mute, having had his tongue cut out at some point in his life.

His linguistic understanding suggests that he must have once travelled widely, something further suggested by his fluency in sign language which was, perhaps learned at the Ottoman court

Very little is known about Shiraz and who he was before he encountered Zahara as a child in the terrible floods that ravaged the city whose name he bears.

But a little observation can perhaps be made. 

Those floods devastated Shiraz, a city in Persia (modern day Iran), in 1630. But a human catastrophe had occured in Persia the year before when the reforming monarch Shah Abbas the Great died and his dissolute grandson Sam Mirza, Shah Safi came to the throne. 

Abbas the Great was an outward looking monarch who sent embassies around Europe to try and establish trade connections and seek aid against their common enemy – the Ottoman Empire. He also employed the English brothers Anthony and Robert Shirley to teach modern warfare to his troops.

Is it too much to imagine a young Shiraz, having completed his own military training with the Shirleys, being part of such embassies, learning the languages of the places he visited? Perhaps even being sent to the Sublime Porte on a diplomatic venture. Maybe as much a spy as a diplomat…

But if this was his history it would have come to an abrupt end with the death of Shah Abbas the great. Shah Safi proceeded to execute all the key courtiers and generals of his grandfather’s reign. Perhaps the man who rescued Zahara from the floods was a survivor of that purge, tortured and maimed but alone of his family, permitted to live. But as Shiraz never talks of his life before that time in the floods of Shiraz, it we may never know…