Notes · Book C2The Tale of Bijan and Manijeh

C2.1The Prelude

On a night of total blackness the poet, sleepless and low, calls for a candle, wine and music. His companion offers to tell him an old tale of contrivance, love and magic out of a Pahlavi book if he will put it into verse. He agrees, and begins.

The night was black as jet, a pitchy shroud: The description of night that opens this tale is among the most admired passages in Persian poetry: couplet after couplet doing nothing but blacken the world, image by image, until the turning sphere stands still and the sun’s own hands and feet go slack. It is a set-piece, and it is also the story in miniature, since a young man is about to be dropped into a place where there is no day.

No Bahram, Kayvan, Tir behind that cloud: The three are Mars, Saturn and Mercury (on Bahram and Kayvan, see I, B9.27); their absence means cloud so thick that the sky is not dark but gone. Tir is Mercury, and in the calendar the name also belongs to Tishtrya, the rain-star, whose feast Tirgan is still kept by Zoroastrians.

As though famed Harut had displayed his art: Harut and Marut are the two angels named in the Quran who came down to Babil and taught men magic; later tradition hangs them head-down in a well there. For Persian poets Harut is the type of the enchanter, and here the candle and the chang undo the darkness as his art might have done.

Bring them to verse out of the Pahlavi.: Ferdowsi’s usual posture is that of a man versifying an old book. What is unusual is the frame: the source is a woman of his own household who reads the tale aloud while he drinks, and who tells him to turn it into verse. No other episode in the poem is introduced quite like this, and the story that follows is the most domestic in the Shahnameh.

C2.2Irman’s People Appeal to Khosrow

Khosrow is feasting with his champions when envoys from the Irman marches beg help against giant boars ruining their fields. He offers treasure to whoever will go, and only Bijan volunteers. Giv protests that his son is too young, and Khosrow sends Gorgin as guide.

Wild boars have gathered there in countless bands: The boar was not simply vermin in older Iranian thought: among the ten forms the war-god Verethragna takes in the Avesta is a sharp-tusked boar, and Iranian warriors bore the name proudly (see I, B5.10). Ferdowsi’s boars keep the ferocity and lose the glory. They are a plague on farmland, and clearing them is a job of work, not a duel.

And Kavus’s brand on every flank was seared: Horses were branded on the flank with their owner’s mark, so the brand tells the champions exactly what is on offer: ten head out of the old royal stud of Kay Kavus, the Shah’s grandfather. The salver of gems is the wage; the branded horses are the honor, and it is the honor Bijan answers.

C2.3Bijan Goes to Fight the Wild Boars

Bijan and Gorgin ride toward the forest, hunting with cheetahs and hawks along the way. Gorgin refuses any part in the fight, so Bijan goes in alone, kills the boars with his khanjar, and loads their heads and tusks to carry before the Shah.

He left the court with cheetahs trained to chase: Cheetahs were trained for coursing gazelle in Iran for centuries and slipped at the game much as a hawk is cast; the pillion seat behind the saddle, by which they were carried to the field, is described mainly in later Persian and Indian sources. Cheetah and falcon together are the standard furniture of a royal hunt, and the detail matters here: the two men set out as if on a pleasure ride, and only one of them expects a fight.

Like a steel file that grates on flinty stone: Boars do whet their tusks against tree-trunks, and Ferdowsi turns the habit into a file grating on flint. The passage is built throughout from observed behavior, the charging by herds, the earth thrown up, the tusks striking sparks, which is why these beasts read as animals and not as monsters.

C2.4Gorgin Tricks Bijan

Envious of Bijan’s triumph, Gorgin praises him over wine, then describes a garden two days off where Afrasiab’s daughter Manijeh keeps her spring feast with a hundred maids. He proposes they carry the women off, and Bijan, young and eager for fame, is caught.

Who digs a pitfall in another’s way: The proverb is already familiar in the poem (see I, B13.22), but here Ferdowsi lets it come true in the flesh: the trap Gorgin lays turns into a literal pit with a stone across its mouth, and Gorgin himself ends the tale in fetters. The image is planted before the snare is even set.

While bolbols worship under cypress skies: Gorgin baits his trap with a lyric poem. Rose and bolbol, cypress and jasmine, silken soil and painted idols are the furniture of Persian love poetry rather than of epic, and Ferdowsi plants the whole apparatus inside a war story as a temptation, the one thing that will move a young man who has just turned down treasure.

C2.5Bijan Seeks Manijeh

In the Irman meadows Gorgin reports that Manijeh has come. Bijan puts on his father’s crown and the jeweled gifts of his house, rides to the grove and watches the feast. Manijeh sees him, sends her nurse with questions, and after messages pass she invites him in.

Has Siavash arisen from the dead: Manijeh’s first guess is the most ominous thing she could have said. Siavash too came from Iran into Turan, too married a daughter of Afrasiab, and was killed by her father for it. Ferdowsi puts the comparison in the girl’s mouth before the affair has begun; the story of Bijan is that pattern running a second time, and only the ending differs.

Are you a pari, or Siavash reborn: A pari in the Avesta (pairika) is a dangerous female being in Ahriman’s service, a witch who ruins heroes; by Ferdowsi’s day she has become the beautiful fairy of Persian verse, and the word reached European languages as ‘peri’. Both senses are alive here: Manijeh takes Bijan for one, and he will later blame one for carrying him off (C2.8).

C2.6Bijan Goes to Manijeh’s Tent

Manijeh clasps Bijan, unbinds his girdle, has him bathed in musk and rosewater, and clears the tent for a feast of music, wine and scattered gold. Three days and nights pass in gladness, and then sleep and drink take him.

With barbat, chang, and songs of music sweet: The chang is the angular Persian harp, the commonest instrument of Sasanian court music and the one this poem names most often. The great Sasanian hunting reliefs show harpers playing from boats while the king shoots boar in a marsh: the hunt and the harp, the two pleasures this story has just run together.

Then sleep and drunkenness held Bijan fast: Both halves of this batch turn on a sleeping hero. Rostam lay down by a spring and woke in the air with the ground cut away beneath him (C1.4); Bijan falls asleep at a feast and wakes in Afrasiab’s palace. In each case the hero’s strength is perfectly intact and perfectly useless.

C2.7Manijeh Carries Bijan to Her Palace

Rather than let him go, Manijeh has Bijan drugged, laid in a curtained litter, veiled as a woman and smuggled into her palace, then revived. They feast until the gatekeeper learns who he is and tells Afrasiab, who rages and sends Garsivaz to seize whoever is found.

She veiled him in a woman’s robe from sight: The shabestan was a sealed precinct (see I, A6.14), and Manijeh uses both of the only ways through it, a closed litter and a woman’s veil. Her method also settles what kind of love story this is: she does not elope with him, she carries him home unconscious. The abduction here is the woman’s.

Who gets a daughter where a son should be: Ferdowsi keeps his harshest sayings for the mouths of angry men, and Afrasiab talks here like a book of maxims: a daughter is a disgrace waiting to happen, and her best bridegroom is the grave. The tale does not agree with him. It is Manijeh who keeps Bijan alive, and she ends it brought home to Iran as his wife.

C2.8Bijan Is Brought before Afrasiab

Garsivaz breaks into the revel, finds Bijan among the women and taunts him. Bijan draws a hidden khanjar but yields on oath and is bound. Before Afrasiab he blames a pari for carrying him off; the king rejects the tale and orders a gallows set at the gate.

A water-tempered blade from hilt to root: A khanjar carried in the boot is the last weapon left to an unarmored man, and the only reason this scene is a negotiation rather than an arrest. ‘Water-tempered’ renders the Persian use of ab, water, for the quenching of steel and for the watery sheen of a good blade, the same idea behind the English ‘watered’ steel.

A pari came and spread her wings out wide: Bijan lies to save Manijeh rather than himself, and says so in the next breath; he builds the lie out of the pari she had first mistaken him for (C2.5). Rostam told a comparable tale to Akvan to save his own life (C1.4). Ferdowsi lets his heroes deceive when strength is gone, and thinks no worse of them for it.

Hung on the tree with no wound, in disgrace: What Bijan dreads is not death but a death without a wound. A hanged man has nothing to show, and the champions of Iran will read the manner of his dying as a verdict on him. A warrior’s honor is a public account kept by other warriors, and that is exactly what the gallows takes from him.

C2.9Piran Pleads for Bijan’s Life

Piran, riding past, sees the gibbet and Bijan bound, hears his story and has the execution stayed. At court he argues that killing Bijan will renew the feud over Siavash and bring Rostam and Gudarz down on Turan. Afrasiab yields and orders imprisonment instead.

A kamand hanging from it, coiled and tight: The rope coiled ready on the gibbet is a kamand, the same word as the hero’s riding-rope (C1.3). Ferdowsi has just spent an entire tale on a kamand that took a Div alive; this one is waiting for Rostam’s own grandson, and the repetition is unlikely to be accidental.

I said, ‘Do not slay Kay Kavus’s son: Piran is the one Turanian Ferdowsi treats with full sympathy, and his argument never changes: the feud will destroy Turan, and the king never listens. He argued against the murder of Siavash and was overruled; he saves Bijan here and is disregarded in everything else. Gudarz will kill him at the Battle of the Twelve Rukhs (C3).

C2.10Bijan Is Put in Bonds

Bijan is riveted in chains and cast headfirst into a pit sealed with Akvan’s stone. Manijeh’s palace is stripped and she is driven barefoot to the pit-mouth, where she scrapes a small opening, begs bread from door to door, and feeds him.

Take elephants where Akvan’s great stone lies: This is why the Akvan story stands immediately before this one. The lid of Bijan’s pit is the stone the verse ties to the Div, raised out of the sea and left in the wilds of Chin, and it takes elephants to shift. Only one man alive will be able to lift it off, and he has just killed the Div it is named for.

Manijeh went from door to door for bread: A king’s daughter whose face no sun had seen unveiled, begging barley bread at strangers’ doors, is the sharpest reversal Ferdowsi gives any woman in the poem, and he holds it for pages: the sealed pit, the scraped hole, the crust carried through the dust. The pit-mouth became a favorite subject of Persian painters.

C2.11Gorgin Brings False Tidings of Bijan

Gorgin searches a week, finds only Bijan’s riderless horse and turns home in fear. Giv rides out to meet him and collapses in grief. Gorgin invents a marvelous Gur-e-Khar that carried Bijan away; Giv sees through the lie but waits for the Shah’s justice.

Its coat was Gudarz’s Golgun, hair for hair: Gorgin assembles his imaginary beast out of horses his hearers already love: Gudarz’s Golgun, whose name means rose-colored, Farhad’s Shabahang, Bijan’s own Shabrang, with Rakhsh for a sire, and he gives it the vanishing trick of Akvan (C1.3). The lie is a patchwork of stories already in circulation, which is what makes it briefly convincing.

He marked confused words, eyes that would not meet: Ferdowsi is unusually exact about how a lie is caught: the yellow face, the eyes that will not meet, the trembling, and above all words that stop matching the words before. Khosrow will detect it the same way, by listening until the account contradicts itself (C2.12). Nobody in this story needs magic to know Gorgin is lying.

C2.12Giv Brings Gorgin before Khosrow

Giv lays his case before the Shah, who comforts him with a prophecy that Bijan will fight in the coming war. Gorgin’s story falls apart under questioning; Khosrow curses him and has him fettered. Giv is told to search, and to wait for Nowruz and the world-revealing cup.

He laid the diamond-hard tusks, one by one: The tusks are Bijan’s trophy, cut and loaded by him (C2.3), and Gorgin now lays them at the throne as the fruit of his own journey while their owner lies under a stone. Ferdowsi lets us watch a dead man’s credit stolen before the questioning starts, which is what makes the Shah’s anger feel earned.

Gudarz’s offspring make the lions bleed: The house of Gudarz son of Keshvad is the largest of Iran’s champion families, and its long feud with Piran’s house is the subject of the Battle of the Twelve Rukhs (C3). Bijan is Giv’s only son, so his loss would end a branch rather than thin one, and that is why a whole clan mobilizes for one young man.

C2.13The Cup Reveals Bijan

At Nowruz Khosrow prays, then takes the world-revealing cup and reads the heavens in it. He searches the seven climes in vain until, by Yazdan’s leave, he sees Bijan chained in a pit in Gorgasaran with a noble maid tending him. Only Rostam can free him.

He took the cup and gazed, and in its round: On the cup of Jam, see I, A4.1. What matters here is that it works as a rite and not as an instrument: the Shah dresses, prays, praises the sun and puts on the Kayanian crown before he looks, and even then he searches the seven climes without success until Yazdan permits the sight. What the cup holds is the turning sphere, where the future is written.

Draws up the nahang from the deep sea’s sand: Khosrow’s reason for needing Rostam is chosen with care: the man who can draw a nahang out of deep water is the man who can lift a stone off a pit (C2.10). The rescue will turn on strength of a very particular kind, and the king names it before anyone knows what it is for.

C2.14Khosrow Writes to Rostam

The Shah dictates a letter to Rostam: a catalogue of his victories, a reminder of Giv’s long service and of his single son, and a request that Rostam come at once with Giv to plan Bijan’s rescue, with men and treasure for the asking.

Have cut your name upon their signet rings: Authority in Ferdowsi’s world traveled by the engraved seal-ring, which turned a letter into a command. A name cut on an enemy king’s own seal is the largest claim this letter makes for Rostam’s fame, and the image is worth keeping: a ring with Rostam’s name on it is exactly what goes down into the pit at the end of this batch (C2.22).

You are the loosener of every chain: The praise is selected, not general. Every feat Khosrow names bears on the task he is about to set: Rostam has drawn a nahang from the sea, bound sorcerers, and unties knots that defeat other men, and his strength was given him so that his hand ‘might reach and save / Him who cries out, from the dark pit’s own grave.’ The letter is an argument in the shape of a compliment.

C2.15Giv Brings Word to Rostam

Giv rides hard to Sistan, where Zal meets him and says Rostam is out hunting. Giv pours out his grief, hands over the letter and reports what the cup showed. Ferdowsi sets out the marriage ties between the two houses, and Rostam swears to free Bijan.

He hunts the Gur-e-Khar; and when the sun: Zal’s answer is a quiet joke at the expense of the last story: Rostam is out after a Gur-e-Khar again. The beast that turned into a Div and threw him into the sea (C1.3) has gone back to being game, and the man who fought it is at home in Zabul, hunting until sundown.

Giv wed brave Rostam’s daughter as his own: Ferdowsi stops the story to spell out the kinship (see I, B8.16): Giv is married to Rostam’s daughter and Rostam to Giv’s sister, who bore Faramarz, so Bijan is Rostam’s grandson. The rescue is therefore not a favor done the crown but a claim of blood, and the poem establishes it in plain words before Rostam answers.

C2.16Giv Is Feasted by Rostam

Rostam reads the letter, promises to go as the Shah bids, and keeps Giv three days at wine with Zal, Zavareh and Faramarz, vowing to set all Turan wailing for Bijan’s wrong. On the fourth day they are to ride for Iran.

To order razm o bazm as he willed: Razm o bazm, battle and banquet, is the pair that organizes Persian heroic poetry and the painting made from it: a champion is judged by how he keeps a table as much as by how he fights, and Ferdowsi says so outright here. The three days of wine before the fourth day’s departure are not delay but the form the undertaking takes.

C2.17Rostam Comes to Khosrow

Rostam leaves Faramarz to guard Zabul and rides for Iran with a hundred horsemen. Giv goes ahead with the news, and the champions ride out to meet him. Rostam greets the Shah with a blessing that runs through the whole year, and reports his household well.

After Kay Kavus’s rite they came and dressed: Riding out to meet an arriving guest was a graded courtesy with rules of its own: the greater the guest, the larger the party and the further out it goes. Khosrow sends two-thirds of his champions, and at parting a Shah rides some stages beside the guest himself, as Khosrow did at the close of the Akvan story (C1.6).

May Shahrivar be victory, and fill: Rostam blesses the king by walking through the Zoroastrian year. Each month, and each day within the month, has its guardian: Ormozd, Bahman, Ordibehesht, Shahrivar, Sapandarmad, Khordad, Mordad, Farvardin and the rest (on the names themselves, see I, A7.1 and I, B9.43). The wish therefore covers every day there is. It is a calendar in the form of a compliment.

C2.18The Pahlevans Feast with Khosrow

In the garden a golden throne is set beneath a jeweled tree whose hollow fruits, filled with musk and wine, shower scent on arriving guests. Khosrow seats Rostam beside him, praises the house of Gudarz, and asks him to save Bijan; Rostam accepts and refuses troops.

A jeweled tree whose limbs of gold were made: Artificial trees of gold and silver hung with gem fruit were real court marvels rather than poetic fancy: Arabic accounts describe one with jeweled birds in the Abbasid palace at Baghdad within living memory of Ferdowsi’s century. The pierced fruits filled with musk and wine, raining scent on whoever approaches the throne, look like the poet’s own addition.

I want no sepahbod, no chosen train: Rostam refuses an army two chapters before he explains what he means to do instead (C2.20), so the reader knows the rescue will be won some other way long before learning how. It is also a refusal of the usual epic apparatus: no muster, no banners, no pitched field. The best fighter in the poem is about to go to work in disguise.

C2.19Rostam Pleads for Gorgin

Gorgin sends word begging Rostam to intercede. Rostam rebukes him but agrees, warning that if Bijan dies Gudarz and Giv will still claim his blood. Two days later he asks the Shah, who has sworn against mercy, and Khosrow frees Gorgin for Rostam’s sake.

His fight with nahang on that deep sea-floor?: Rostam quotes a beast-fable of a leopard and a nahang as though his hearer must know it, and the tale itself is never told. The Shahnameh’s characters argue constantly from such stories, a useful reminder of how much oral matter stood behind the poem that Ferdowsi could point at without stopping to relate.

The Shah, for Rostam’s sake, removed his chain: Khosrow has just sworn by throne, crown, moon and planets that Gorgin will have no mercy, and he breaks the oath at Rostam’s asking. Ferdowsi keeps measuring the standing of the Pahlevan against the standing of the crown; here it costs a king his oath, and in the tragedy of Esfandiyar (C8) the same tension costs a great deal more.

C2.20Rostam Arms His Men

Khosrow offers troops and treasure. Rostam answers that this task needs craft, not weapons: they will travel as merchants. He takes ten camel-loads of minted gold and a hundred of goods, a thousand horsemen for the caravan, and names seven chiefs to guard it.

But go as merchants, clothed in merchant gear: The plan works because the frontier it crosses was a trade road before it was a war road: caravans of gems and brocade moved between Iran and the lands beyond the Jihun when no army could, and their safety was the local lord’s affair. A merchant with a jeweled cup can be welcomed by the enemy’s own marzban, as Rostam is about to be (C2.21).

These seven warriors must be armed and ready: The first name on the list is Gorgin, out of his fetters one chapter earlier: Rostam takes the traitor along rather than leave him behind, so that the man who lost Bijan helps fetch him back and stays where he can be watched. The other six are chiefs of the first rank, which makes this caravan the Iranian high command dressed in wool.

C2.21Rostam Goes to Khutan to Piran

Rostam leaves the army at the border, puts his seven chiefs into merchant dress and enters Khutan. Meeting Piran after the hunt, he presents a cup of gems and two horses, claims to be a trader from Iran, and is granted protection and a house that becomes a market.

By God’s decree Piran knew not his face: Piran has faced the champions of Iran for a lifetime, and Ferdowsi knows quite well that he ought to recognize the largest man alive. He meets the difficulty by handing it to providence: the Maker shaped those features, and by decree Piran does not know them. The poet names his problem instead of hiding it.

Make my son’s house your home within this land: Piran, who saved Bijan from the gallows (C2.9), now offers his own son’s house to the man who has come to undo his king. Ferdowsi gives the best Turanian in the poem the worst luck in it: nearly every decent thing he does serves the side that will destroy him and his sons (C3).

C2.22Manijeh Seeks Out Rostam

Hearing of a caravan from Iran, Manijeh begs the merchant for news of Bijan. Rostam shouts her away to protect his disguise, then has her fed, questions her gently, and hides his signet ring inside a roast bird for her to carry down into the pit.

Be off!” he cried. “I do not know Khosrow: Rostam plays his part badly, and the scene is the better for it. He shouts the beggar-woman down, cannot hold the pose, calls for food, questions her, weeps, and ends by telling her what he would give if her father were not in the way. The disguise that got past Piran almost fails in front of a starving girl.

Inside the bird he hid his ring from sight: Recognition by token is as old as storytelling, and Ferdowsi gives it the humblest possible carriage: a roast bird in a wrap of bread, the sort of scrap a beggar is handed at a door, with a seal ring inside it. The ring carries a name (C2.14), so it is a letter that needs no words, which is as well in a pit where there is no light.

C2.23Bijan Learns Rostam Is Coming

Manijeh carries the merchant’s food to the pit and Bijan finds Rostam’s ring hidden in it. He laughs, swears her to secrecy, and sends her back with a password. Rostam tells her to burn a fire by night to mark the pit-mouth.

A turquoise seal bore Rostam’s name; each line / Was cut with iron, like a hair so fine.: A signet, not an ornament: the engraved ring was a man’s signature, pressed into wax or clay to close letters and storerooms, and so the surest proof of identity he could send. Iran’s turquoise came chiefly from the mines near Nishapur, and the stone was held to bring its wearer luck.

A woman’s tongue will seldom bear the chain.: Bijan insults her in the moment she has saved him, and Ferdowsi lets Manijeh answer at length — her treasure, her family, her veil, all spent on him — until he takes it back and calls her his prudent counselor. The poet gives the proverb its say and then dismantles it.

C2.24Rostam Rescues Bijan from the Pit

Seven chiefs cannot shift the stone, so Rostam lifts it alone and hurls it away. He makes Bijan pardon Gorgin before drawing him up by kamand, breaks his fetters, and sends him off with Manijeh while he rides against Afrasiab.

When Rostam reached the boulder Akvan cast,: Seven of Iran’s strongest men cannot budge the stone that Rostam then lifts alone. The detail also ties the rescue back to Rostam’s own fight with the Div Akvan, which opens this volume (II, C1); on the name Akvan, see I, B14.28.

Forgive Gorgin, Milad’s son, and break: Rostam makes forgiveness the price of rescue, and takes the promise while Bijan is still in the dark and in chains. It is how the story clears its books: Gorgin, whose lie about the hunt began all this, has to be returned to the army usable, and a private feud cannot be carried into the coming war.

My earth is iron, and my sky is stone.: The pit is a small inverted world, its ground iron and its heaven rock. Ferdowsi takes the image up again at the end of the tale, when Kay Khosrow describes fortune flinging one man into a pit and lifting another out of one (II, C2.29).

C2.25Rostam Attacks Afrasiab’s Palace by Night

Rostam and seven chiefs break the palace door at night, cut down the guards and taunt Afrasiab from the passage. The king raises the alarm and then flees; the Iranians strip the palace and ride hard to rejoin the baggage.

While all slept soundly in the royal hall,: The night raid is a recognized stratagem in the poem (shabikhun; see I, A6.21), but Rostam uses it for humiliation rather than gain. He shouts his own name and Zal’s down the passage so that Afrasiab will know who came through his iron doors, and leaves him alive to be laughed at by his own men.

Though wine is spilled, its fragrance does not fade.: Rostam comforts a king’s daughter who has lost her rank, her family and her fortune with a proverb about what survives ruin, and adds the poem’s standing consolation that joy and grief take turns. It is the nearest thing to tenderness Ferdowsi allows him, and it is offered in the middle of a retreat.

C2.26Afrasiab Comes against Rostam

Afrasiab’s nobles come to his gate ungirt with shame, and he arms all Turan. Rostam sets his small force with the mountain at his back, wings under Ashkash, Gostaham, Rohham and Zangeh, and answers the great army with a speech of beast-proverbs.

Have you not heard the ancient words of Zal,: Rostam meets an argument from numbers with a chain of beast-proverbs credited to his father. The chiefs of these books quote such sayings at each other constantly, and so does the narrator; wisdom is an inherited possession here, handed down like armor, and Zal is its usual source.

Behind the army rose Bistoon’s great height;: The name is given here to a mountain in Turan. Persian readers take Bisotun as “without pillars,” but the ancient name behind the great rock in the Zagros, where Farhad carved for Shirin (I, A9.3), is Old Persian Bagastana, “place of the gods”; the pillarless reading is a later folk etymology. Here the word seems to describe a sheer peak rather than to name that place.

C2.27The Iranians Defeat Afrasiab

The armies join. Rostam drives through the Turanian center while Ashkash and Rohham break the wings; Afrasiab throws down his sword and flees. Rostam pursues him two farsangs, takes a thousand captives, and turns back toward Kay Khosrow with the spoils.

He cast his Indian sword upon the ground,: “Indian sword” is a standing phrase rather than a detail: the crucible steel of India, worked into blades with a watered pattern, was the best in the medieval world, and Persian verse uses hendi almost as a synonym for a fine edge. Throwing one away is Afrasiab discarding his own standing.

They bound bronze khom on elephants arrayed;: The khom is the great brazen kettledrum carried on elephant-back; its name is the word for a big-bellied jar, which is roughly its shape. On the rest of the war-band — kous, karnay, ney, gavdam — see I, B10.4 and I, B5.11.

C2.28Rostam’s Return to Kay Khosrow

Word of the rescue reaches the Shah, who prostrates himself in thanks. Gudarz, Giv and the army ride out in procession to meet Rostam, and Kay Khosrow comes on the road himself; Rostam hands over Bijan and a thousand Turanian captives.

On one side, leopards and lions strained in chains;: Great cats on chains belong to the pageantry of a royal reception. Iranian courts, and the Islamic courts that followed them, kept lions and hunting leopards and led them out in procession as a sign of a king’s reach over the wild; they walk here beside the elephants and the drums.

You made our house the servants of your name,: Gudarz’s house has a claim on Rostam by marriage: Giv is married to Rostam’s daughter, so Bijan is Rostam’s grandson (I, B8.16). The gratitude is political as well as familial — the house of Keshvad is about to carry the whole next war, and it begins it owing Zabul a debt.

C2.29Kay Khosrow Holds a Feast

After the wine-hall feast Rostam takes leave with lavish gifts and rides for Sistan. Kay Khosrow hears Bijan’s account, forgives him, sends treasure to Manijeh with a warning about fortune’s turns, and Ferdowsi closes the tale.

They set the wine-hall ready for their lord.: Razm and bazm, battle and banquet, are the two poles of the Shahnameh, and no campaign is finished until the wine-hall is furnished, the harpists seated and the gifts counted out. Ferdowsi gives the feast the same careful inventory he gives an army.

She casts in need’s deep pit, bereft of rest.: Khosrow’s homily on fortune turns the story’s own pit into its emblem: the wheel drops one man into a pit and lifts another out of one to a throne, which is exactly what has happened to Bijan and to Manijeh. The romance ends by being converted into a figure of speech.

To Gudarz and Piran I now attend.: Ferdowsi names the coming book after its two commanders. It is also known as the Battle of the Twelve Rukhs, after the twelve single combats at its climax; rokh is usually read as “face,” hence the twelve champions, though the word is also the chess rook and the resemblance to a paired game has often been remarked.