Notes · Book C3The Battle of the Twelve Rukhs

C3.1The Prelude

A homily opens the book: the world passes, greed brings only toil, and knowledge and truth cost their owner nothing. A man needs food, clothing and a bed; the rest is appetite, and the sea of life keeps its treasury locked.

The world goes by in sorrow, day by day;: Ferdowsi opens his longer episodes with a sermon of this kind and chooses its subject to fit what follows. The theme here is greed and what cannot be kept — apt for a book in which Piran offers a fortune, hostages and half a map for peace, and Gudarz refuses to be bought at any price.

You need your food, your clothing, and your bed;: The three necessities are a commonplace of Persian and Arabic wisdom writing, and Ferdowsi gives it the plainness of a proverb rather than a sermon. He is not recommending poverty: the same poem spends whole chapters counting out robes, horses and dinars, and admires a king who gives them away.

C3.2Afrasiab Summons the Army of Turan

Shamed by Rostam’s raid, Afrasiab falls back on Khallokh, summons his chiefs, and resolves on total war. He opens the treasuries kept since Tur, sends Shideh with fifty thousand to Khwarazm, and orders Piran into Iran with fifty thousand more.

He hurried on till Khallokh lay ahead;: Khallokh is the country of the Karluk Turks, beyond the Syr Darya. To Persian poets it was also a byword for beauty, so that a Khallokhi face is a standing compliment; here Ferdowsi uses the name in plain geography, as one of the eastern provinces Afrasiab can fall back on.

We must cross over Jihun with our train,: Jihun is the Arabic name of the Oxus, the Amu Darya, and in the Shahnameh it is the border itself: Turan begins on the far bank, and almost every campaign in these books is described as a crossing. Amuy, named next, is the crossing-place where the armies ford or ferry.

C3.3Kay Khosrow Sends Gudarz against Turan

Warned that Turan is massing, Kay Khosrow takes counsel, pays and arms his troops, and sends out four armies: Rostam to Sistan and Hind, Lohrasp westward, Ashkash to Khwarazm against Shideh, and Gudarz against Piran, with careful orders on conduct.

Do not grow rash like Tus at every slight: The warning points back to Tus, who disobeyed orders, destroyed Forood’s castle and was recalled in disgrace (I, B12.20). He is still the poem’s standard of what a commander must not be — and before this batch ends the Shah has given him an army again (II, C3.19).

The fourth great army he gave Gudarz to lead,: Four armies go out at once, and the design is encirclement. Khosrow explains it to Gudarz later: Afrasiab sits on the riverbank not because he is about to invade but because he cannot move without losing everything behind him (II, C3.18).

Take care you do no wrongful deed by might;: Harm no household that does not arm against you, destroy nothing that thrives, remember that we are passing through: this charge is the poem’s measure of a just campaign, and Khosrow repeats it to every general he sends out. His commanders are judged on it at least as much as on victories.

C3.4Giv Carries Word from Gudarz to Piran

Near Raibad, Gudarz picks a thousand chiefs and sends Giv to Piran with the Shah’s terms: hand over Siavash’s killers, your whole treasure, and your son and brothers as hostages; or come over to Khosrow, or retire to Chakh, or fight.

Great Fereydoon left life in grief and pain;: Every message in this book opens where the feud opens, with Tur’s murder of his brother Iraj and the grief that broke Fereydoon (told in Volume I, in the book of Fereydoon). Iran and Turan are one family at law, which is why their wars are pressed like a blood-suit, with named killers demanded.

Bind them like dogs and send them from your band,: The demand is juridical rather than merely vengeful: the Shah has furnished a list of the men who shed Siavash’s blood and asks for their surrender for judgment, with his own discretion to pardon. Piran’s refusal to give up his kin is what makes the battle unavoidable, and the demand returns in Gudarz’s last letter (II, C3.21).

C3.5Giv’s Visit to Piran

Giv finds Piran at Visagard; the two sides talk for two weeks beside the Jihun and settle nothing. Piran reports to Afrasiab, receives thirty thousand more men, hardens, refuses every term, and moves his army to Kanabad.

And washed away his honor, choosing spite.: Piran is the one man of Turan the poem admires: he sheltered Siavash, saved the child Kay Khosrow, and has just been promised his life and his rank whatever the war brings. This is the line in which he chooses his king over his conscience, and from here his end is settled.

Two weeks they spoke to keep the peace in sight,: Ferdowsi gives the negotiation as much room as a battle, and this book is half embassy and letter: Giv’s mission here, Piran’s offer of peace, Gudarz’s refusal. Even the single combats it ends in are a negotiated form of war, proposed on paper before they are fought.

C3.6The Armies Are Set in Array

The armies take position between Raibad and Kanabad. Gudarz sets wings, rear and flank guards under named chiefs, with the Kaviani standard at the center; Piran, finding no ground to attack on, hides Ruyin and ten thousand men in the woods.

From Raibad out to Kanabad they spread;: Raibad and Kanabad, the Iranian and Turanian positions, are the fixed poles of this book: nearly everything happens on the plain between them, and every challenge is offered there. Neither name can be identified on the ground with any confidence.

Like sun in Aries on New Year’s Day,: The sun enters Aries at the spring equinox, which is Nowruz (I, A4.1). Gudarz is telling Rohham to be the light of his wing at the turn of the year — a New Year simile in a book whose commanders are already reckoning how few weeks remain before the ground freezes (II, C3.7).

Lay with his men concealed by bush and tree.: This ambush explains the stillness of the chapters that follow. Piran cannot reach Gudarz in his valley, so he must draw him onto open ground where Ruyin can take him from behind; Gudarz can see it and will not move. Unable to fight with armies, both sides fight by champions instead.

C3.7Bijan Urges Giv to Fight

Neither army moves for days. On the fourth day Bijan comes to the center with his clothes torn, charges Gudarz with losing his nerve since Pashan and Ladan, and offers to clear the ambush himself. Giv praises him, defends his grandfather’s patience, and Bijan agrees to wait.

Since at Ladan he saw his sons lie slain,: Pashan and Ladan are the earlier defeats of the long war in which Gudarz lost his sons — seventy of them by the poem’s reckoning, a number repeated throughout as the measure of his claim. The whole Twelve Rukhs is his blood-suit, which is what makes Bijan’s charge of cowardice the cruelest thing said in this book.

And searched the heavens for an hour of good.: Gudarz is doing what a commander was expected to do: waiting for an hour chosen from the stars before he moves. The poem treats this as prudence rather than superstition, and he consults the sky again after Houman’s insult (II, C3.11). On the astronomers’ tables, see I, B9.12.

C3.8Houman Seeks Leave for Battle

Houman comes to his brother Piran demanding battle, or leave to fight alone. Piran gives four reasons for waiting — Khosrow’s standing, Gudarz’s rank, his grief, and his unassailable ground — and warns that Iran will only send a lesser man. Houman rejects it all.

A lion as he reached his brother’s side.: Houman and Nastihan are Piran’s brothers, sons of Viseh, and their clan is to Turan what the house of Keshvad — Gudarz, Giv, Bijan, Rohham, Hajir — is to Iran. The war ahead is largely these two families destroying each other, and it begins with an elder brother failing to hold back a younger.

We must induce the foe to leave that height,: Piran states the purpose of the men hidden in the woods (II, C3.6). His four numbered reasons are also a model of how this book argues: the letters to come answer one another point by point, and the war is conducted in enumerated cases as much as in charges.

C3.9Houman Challenges Rohham

Houman rides out at dawn with an interpreter, passes the Iranian outposts, and challenges Rohham on the left wing. Rohham replies that no Iranian may fight without Gudarz’s leave and sends him to the commander; Houman mocks him and rides on.

And took an interpreter along with him.: Iranians and Turanians do not share a language, and Ferdowsi remembers it: a challenger rides out with an interpreter who shouts the defiance in the other tongue. The two interpreters at Bijan’s duel are spared by agreement precisely so that they can report what happened (II, C3.14).

He seeks a champion in the open fight;: The set-piece begins here: a single rider passes down the enemy line naming champions while both armies watch. Three chapters of challenge and refusal prepare the formal series of paired combats that gives the book its name, and Piran will propose that very form of battle by treaty (II, C3.20).

C3.10Houman Challenges Fariborz

Houman crosses to the other wing and taunts Fariborz with having lost his troops and Kaveh’s standard to the Turks, and with failing to avenge his brother Siavash. Fariborz answers that the command is Gudarz’s and only he can release a champion.

From Tur, the king of Turan, springs my race;: Houman claims descent from Tur, which makes him a distant kinsman of the man he is taunting: both sides of this war go back to Fereydoon’s sons. The insult is therefore about rank within one family, and the letters later in the book argue the case on exactly the same ground.

If he commands, I shall encounter you,: Three chiefs in turn refuse on the same ground: no champion may take up a challenge without his commander’s leave. Ferdowsi sets the claims of honor against the discipline of an army and gives discipline the better of it — and Houman’s freedom to ride wherever he likes is in the end what kills him.

C3.11Houman Challenges Gudarz

Houman comes to Gudarz himself and mocks him for hiding behind a mountain. Gudarz refuses to be drawn, reasoning that a victory would only keep Piran in his ambush. Houman rides off, shoots four of the guard, and boasts on the heights while Gudarz burns with shame.

Will raise red tulips on the yellow height.’: Blood on a battlefield comes up as tulips: the flower is the standard Persian figure for a wound and for the ground of a killing, and Bijan uses it again before the duel, promising that his enemy’s blood will flower from the clay (II, C3.14). Red on yellow — the line is a painting.

The path to pluck a rose is lined with thorn.: Houman argues in proverbs about cost, and this one is among the most durable in the language. The irony is that he is quoting it at the one man on the field who has paid most for what he wants.

C3.12News of Houman Reaches Bijan

Told of Houman’s boasting, Bijan arms and demands Siavash’s armor. He tells Giv that Gudarz has lost his nerve, is refused, appeals to Gudarz himself, and wins leave to fight. Giv protests and is overruled; Bijan rides for the field.

If you once saw my fight when Forood fell,: Bijan offers as his credential the campaign in which the Iranians besieged and killed Siavash’s other son (I, B12.20). Ferdowsi lets it stand without comment, and the silence does the work: the army about to avenge one son of Siavash killed the other itself.

Thus spoke the grandfather; the youth stood near,: Grandfather, father and son argue the whole question in one chapter: Gudarz grants the combat, Giv refuses to hand over the armor, Bijan defies both and goes anyway. The house of Keshvad is Iran’s army in miniature, and Ferdowsi keeps its politics domestic — a father who will not lend his son a coat.

C3.13Giv Arms Bijan with Siavash’s Jowshan

Giv repents, overtakes Bijan and gives him Siavash’s jowshan and his own horse. Bijan finds an interpreter and rides to Houman; the two trade threats until Houman puts the fight off to dawn, and both camps pass a sleepless night.

Siavash’s jowshan, for battle’s need.: Bijan fights in the murdered prince’s own war-coat, kept all these years in Giv’s house. The vengeance is made literal — the dead man’s armor on the field against the men who killed him — and it explains Giv’s reluctance, since he is being asked to risk his son and his relic together.

Within my claws, a pheasant, you shall lie,: Houman’s boast keeps to the hunting imagery that fills the poem’s insults: hawk and pheasant, lion and fox, leopard and deer. Fighters abuse each other in a bestiary, and an answer has to be made in the same register, which is why Bijan replies with a mountain ram and a snare.

C3.14Houman and Bijan Meet in Combat

At dawn the two ride far from both armies, pledge to spare each other’s interpreters, and fight with bows, spears, swords and gorzes. They wrestle from the saddle without result, break off exhausted to drink, and Bijan prays for strength.

They made a pact: whoever won the day: The duel is fought where no one can see it, so the poem arranges its own witnesses: the survivor will free both interpreters, who will then tell each king what happened. Ferdowsi is careful about how news travels, and in the next chapter both camps learn the truth from these two men.

They took their bows and rode in fierce array,: A Shahnameh duel escalates through a fixed order of arms — arrows, then spears, then swords, then gorzes, and when the iron is spent, the belt-grip and wrestling, as with Rostam and Sohrab (I, B8.20). The sequence lets the poet measure two men exactly, since every stage ends in equality.

C3.15Bijan Slays Houman

Exhausted, the two wrestle again; Bijan throws Houman, beheads him and gives thanks. He hides in Houman’s khaftan, rides his horse and carries his banner to safety, then reverses the flag, and both armies learn the truth at once.

Though Houman was the stronger of the two,: Ferdowsi says plainly that the loser was the better wrestler; the victory belongs to the turn of fortune, and Bijan’s own prayer over the body claims no credit for it. The poem’s heroes win because the sky allows it, which is also how it will account for their deaths.

Reversed the sable banner at his side.: An upturned flag is how a distant field reads a result, and Ferdowsi gets a fine irony from it: the Turkish watchmen see Houman’s own banner coming home and cheer, and send a rider to Piran with the news of a victory that is his brother’s death.

C3.16Nastihan Is Slain in a Night-Attack

Piran sends Nastihan with ten thousand men to attack by night. The scouts see them coming; Bijan meets them with a thousand horsemen, destroys two-thirds of the force and kills Nastihan with his gorz. Piran, told the news, mourns, and both armies fight all day.

A night assault is what these horsemen seek.: On the night raid, see I, A6.21 and II, C2.25. It is a stratagem the poem respects and rarely lets succeed: the sign of it here is silence, a column moving without a voice in it, which the watchmen read at once for what it is.

As though steeped deep in indigo’s dark hue.: Indigo, brought from India as the great blue dye, supplies this book’s color: the air above a battle turns indigo, the ground goes blue-black under iron, and now a man beaten to death with a gorz comes out the color of the vat.

C3.17Gudarz Appeals to Khosrow

Gudarz dictates a secret letter reporting the embassy, the two combats, and Afrasiab’s position on the river, and asks whether the Shah will come. Hajir carries it by relays in a week; Khosrow rewards him lavishly, then prays at dawn for victory.

With a fresh hiyun at each stage he passed.: A courier changed mounts at posting stations and rode day and night, sleeping in the saddle; Hajir covers the road from Turan to the court in a week. The stage-post is an old institution of Iranian government, and the poem calls on it whenever news has to outrun an army. On the hiyun, see I, A6.22.

Rubies in Hajir’s mouth, a gleaming hoard.: Rewarding the bringer of good news is a standing courtesy in the poem, repeated often enough to look like settled practice at the courts Ferdowsi imagined, and he scales it to the news: here a robe of honor, a jeweled crown, ten horses with golden saddles, and gold poured until the messenger’s head is buried in it.

C3.18Khosrow Sends His Reply

Khosrow answers point by point: Piran was never going to make peace; Afrasiab waits by the Jihun because he is encircled; Rostam, Lohrasp and Ashkash are winning elsewhere. He sends Tus to Dehestan, promises to follow, and orders Gudarz to give battle.

Now hear my answer, setting all in light.: The reply is a chancery document: it restates each of Gudarz’s points in order and answers it, numbering as it goes, and Gudarz’s own letter to Piran will do the same at greater length in nine heads (II, C3.21). Ferdowsi’s correspondence is the best record the poem keeps of how a Persian secretariat argued on paper.

He will seize Dehestan and Gorgan’s plain,: Dehestan lay beyond Gorgan at the edge of the steppe east of the Caspian, the poem’s north-eastern gate into Iran and a frontier fought over more than once in the earlier books. Giving Tus that command puts the disgraced general back in the field, on the flank of the main war.

C3.19Khosrow Musters the Army

Tus marches for Dehestan and Khwarazm and Khosrow follows with a hundred thousand men. Hajir returns in a robe of honor with the royal letter; Gudarz has it read to the chiefs, opens his treasury, pays and remounts the army, and reviews it.

Gudarz then called the paymasters to count: A mobilization in the Shahnameh always includes a pay parade: the rolls are counted, the treasury opened, horses brought down from the mountain pastures, the footmen mounted. The poem’s armies are salaried and administered, which is how Ferdowsi’s sources remembered the Sasanian state.

He called brave Tus of Nohzar’s noble line,: Tus has an army again, on the very front the Shah means to take himself; on his disgrace, and on the warning Khosrow attached to his name when sending Gudarz out, see I, B12.20 and II, C3.3. With Manuchehr’s blood in him, his recovery was only a question of time.

C3.20Piran’s Letter to Gudarz

Alarmed by Iran’s mobilization, Piran writes to Gudarz offering peace: every province from Sistan to Sughd returned, treasure and hostages sent, or else the war decided by paired champions. His son Ruyin carries the letter, and Gudarz feasts him for a week without answering.

Of Gharchagan, with Bost below in sight;: The list that follows is a map of the poet’s own east — Balkh, Talikan, Panjhir (the Panjshir valley), Bamiyan, Badakhshan, Tirmid on the Oxus, Bukhara, Sughd — surrendered province by province as the price of peace. The mythical frontier of Iran and Turan is being drawn through real towns.

We two shall pair the champions from our men,: Here is the proposal that names the book. Rather than lose both armies, each side is to put forward matched champions to fight in pairs, with terms for the safe withdrawal of the losing side. Gudarz refuses it now, but this is the shape the war finally takes: twelve single combats between named chiefs.

For one whole week Gudarz delayed his word,: An envoy is untouchable: housed in a new pavilion hung with brocade, fed, entertained, and sent home in a robe of honor with horses and gold — and kept waiting exactly as long as suits his host. Gudarz’s week of harp and wine is a tactic, since Khosrow’s hundred thousand are already on the road.

C3.21Gudarz Replies to Piran

On the eighth day Gudarz dictates his answer and refuses point by point: Piran’s heart and tongue are strangers, the feud reaches back to Iraj, seventy sons are unavenged, the lands are already taken. Ruyin carries it home; Piran hides it and calls his troops to arms.

You are like salt ground glittering in the sun,: A salt flat on the Iranian plateau glares white and looks like standing water to anyone far enough off — the mirage a thirsty traveler rides toward. It is the sharpest image in the book and the exact charge against Piran’s letter: not a lie, but a resemblance to water.

For sightless eyes, alike are day and night.: Gudarz ends where the book’s prelude began. Ferdowsi framed the whole embassy — treasure, provinces, hostages, oaths — with a sermon on greed and what cannot be kept (II, C3.1), and then gave the last word to the one man who wants none of it and will not be bought at any price.

C3.22Piran Seeks Afrasiab’s Aid

Piran sends an elder envoy to Afrasiab with a long dispatch: he confesses fault, reports the deaths of Houman and Nastihan at Bijan’s hands, nine hundred men lost, and Iran’s advantage, and begs the king to bring an army. Afrasiab grieves, then takes heart.

Whoever saw a lofty cypress fall / Before one blade of grass, so weak and small?: Piran’s contempt for the young man who killed his brother; the cypress is the standard Persian figure for a tall warrior (see I, A6.6). The blade of grass will do more damage to his house before the episode ends: Bijan kills Piran’s son Ruyin in C3.34, and it is Bijan who brings in the bodies of his brothers Lahhak and Farshidvard in C3.49.

He mounted on a hiyun, swift and tall: On the hiyun, the fast riding-dromedary of couriers and raiders, see I, A6.22. Ferdowsi measures the distance by the rider rather than in farsangs: the envoy reaches Afrasiab in a single night without stopping to sleep, and the answer takes another ride to come back.

C3.23Afrasiab Replies to Piran

Afrasiab answers warmly, refuses to accept Piran’s guilt, denies that Kay Khosrow is his grandson, and corrects the report: Tus, not Khosrow, is marching. He promises to cross the Jihun himself and sends thirty thousand horsemen. Piran reads the letter out, then privately despairs.

Across Jihun to meet them in array: The Jihun is the Amu Darya, the Oxus of the Greeks, and in the Shahnameh’s geography it is the boundary between Iran and Turan, so that crossing it is itself an act of war. Medieval Arabic geographers connected the name with the Gihon of Genesis, one of the four rivers of paradise.

To call him grandson is a false decree: Kay Khosrow is in fact Afrasiab’s grandson, the son of Siavash and Afrasiab’s own daughter, and both royal houses descend from Fereydoon, through Iraj and Tur. The disclaimer is a legal move as much as a taunt: Afrasiab is refusing the kinship that would make this a quarrel inside one family rather than a war between nations.

C3.24Iran and Turan Fight a Pitched Battle

The two armies fight from dawn until dark. Piran sends Lahhak and Farshidvard to the flanks; Gudarz answers through Giv, who commits Zangeh and Gorgin against them and then charges the Turanian center with Guraza, Gostaham, Bijan and Hajir.

The earth was tulip-hued where blood had stained: The tulip (lāleh), red with a black heart, is the Persian poets’ flower of blood, and Ferdowsi reaches for it whenever a field is soaked; it returns in C3.42. Behind the image lies the older belief that a plant springs up from a hero’s blood. On the one that grew where Siavash died, see I, B9.55.

By dusk, no living warrior stands in sight: Both commanders reach the same conclusion in the same breath, and it is what produces everything that follows: unless champions fight in their armies’ place, the armies will finish each other. The device is old and widespread — in the third book of the Iliad Paris and Menelaus are set to fight so that the rest may go home.

C3.25Giv’s Horse Falters before Piran

Giv breaks through to Piran, but his horse balks and his arrows leave the chief unharmed. Bijan reminds him that only Gudarz can kill Piran. Piran flees to Lahhak and Farshidvard, who fight Giv, Guraza, Bijan and Gostaham to a standstill until nightfall.

His charger halted, rooted to the ground: Fate shows itself in the horses of this episode. Giv’s mount refuses at the moment of the kill; in C3.28 the Turanian champions’ steeds stand “as though bound hand and foot”; in C3.39 Piran’s falls under him and breaks his arm. Giv curses a Div for it, and Bijan is about to tell him the real reason.

Yet at the last Gudarz will take his breath; / He is reserved for that appointed death.: Kay Khosrow’s foreknowledge, a mark of the farr that rests on him (see I, A4.1), settles the outcome of the whole episode before it starts. The champion who can be killed only by one appointed hand is a motif found widely in epic; here it also removes all suspense from the single combats, so that the interest lies in how each man fights rather than who wins.

C3.26The Battle of Eleven Rukhs Is Arranged

At nightfall both sides agree to settle the war by single combat and withdraw to their mountains. Gudarz hears Giv’s account, rehearses the war’s history from Zahhak to the murder of Siavash, redeploys his wings, and leaves Gostaham in charge of the camp.

For death’s dark kamand hunts all humankind.: The kamand is a war-rope with a running noose, coiled at the saddle-bow and thrown to catch a rider or his horse; in this episode it is used mostly to lash dead men across their saddles. Ferdowsi turns the hunter’s rope into an image for death, which takes its quarry as a horseman takes his.

Recall Zahhak, unjust and fierce and grim: Gudarz argues the present war by reciting the poem’s own earlier books: Zahhak’s tyranny, Fereydoon’s rising, the loosing of Ahriman’s bonds (I, A5.9), with Afrasiab cast as the new Zahhak. Ferdowsi lets his characters use the Shahnameh as a book of precedents, and Gudarz is the character who does it most.

On him I shall avenge my seventy sons: Seventy is the round number the poem keeps for Gudarz’s losses; only a handful of the sons are ever named, and several of the best — Giv, Rohham, Hajir, Shidush — are alive and fighting beside him in this very chapter. The figure measures grief rather than counting bodies, and it is the warrant for his claim to fight Piran himself.

C3.27Piran Exhorts His Champions

Piran rallies his mourning troops with maxims and a threat, and they arm. He puts Lahhak and Farshidvard in charge of the army’s safety and tells them to flee to Turan if the day goes against him. They part in tears, and Piran rides out.

The Mobadan have taught in every age: / ‘The victory is God’s at every stage.’: Piran steadies his men with a maxim of the Mobadan (on whom see I, A0.8) at the precise point where the poem is about to show divine favor withdrawn from Turan: in C3.28 his champions’ hands go slack because “God closed against them every door of power.” The comfort is true and useless at the same time.

Then hurry back to Turan; let your flight / Be swift as smoke when fortune turns to spite.: This order is the seed of the last third of the episode. The brothers’ flight, Gostaham’s pursuit and Bijan’s rescue, C3.41 through C3.46, all follow from a commander’s provision for defeat made while he still expects to win. Piran plans his own death as carefully as he plans the battle.

C3.28Gudarz and Piran Choose the Warriors

Piran offers terms: let chosen champions and the two old chiefs decide the war, with the losing side renouncing revenge. Gudarz answers with the charge of Siavash’s murder and accepts. Ten pairs are matched, Gudarz against Piran, and each side marks a hill for its victors’ banners.

And chose ten horsemen armed with sword and shield.: Ten pairs, plus Gudarz against Piran, makes eleven combats, although the episode’s traditional name counts twelve — Davāzdah Rokh, the Twelve Rukhs. Some manuscripts call it Yazdah Rokh, eleven, and the twelfth is generally reckoned to be Gostaham’s pursuit and killing of Piran’s brothers (C3.44–C3.46). Rokh means a face, and is also the rook of the chessboard; both a count of champions and a chess metaphor have been proposed for the title.

Two heights stood opposite across the plain: The staging is formal to the point of ceremony: two facing hills, level ground between them, a banner planted on your own height when you win, and a watchman on each to carry the news back. The eleven fights share one shape — charge, broken weapons, the kill, the body bound across its saddle, the climb, the blessing — and Ferdowsi’s variation works inside that frame.

Gudarz, son of Keshvad, faced Piran: Two houses, not two armies, are fighting: Keshvad’s line against Viseh’s. The Gudarzian names have long been read as a memory of the great Parthian families — Gudarz answers to the Parthian royal name Gotarzes, and Giv to Gēw — which would make this the most historically grounded clan in the legendary books.

For Gurvi seized the spotless prince’s beard: Gurvi, son of Zereh, is the man who actually cut Siavash’s throat, and the pairing is deliberate: the one enemy Kay Khosrow wants alive is matched against Giv, the man most likely to take a prisoner. He is the only one of the eleven not killed in the field, and his account is settled in C3.47.

C3.29Fariborz Battles Kulbad

Fariborz, son of Kavus, opens the day against Kulbad of Viseh’s house. His arrow goes astray, but his sword splits Kulbad to the waist. He binds the body on the saddle, strips its armor, climbs the height and shouts a blessing on Gudarz and the Shah.

First Fariborz, the gallant chief, now came: Precedence by blood: Fariborz is Kavus’s son and the only man of the royal house in the line, so the first combat is his. He had held command of this same army earlier in the war, with Gudarz to advise him (I, B12.20), and this is the plainest success the poem allows him.

He bound dead Kulbad on the saddle tight: The first victory sets the pattern the next ten follow: the corpse lashed across its own saddle, the armor stripped, the captured horse led up the hill, the banner raised, a blessing called down on the Shah and on Gudarz. Bringing the dead back is not display for its own sake — Kay Khosrow is to see them, and in C3.47 he does.

C3.30Giv Battles Gurvi

Giv meets Gurvi, son of Zereh. Their spears break; Giv, meaning to take him alive, stuns him with the ox-head gorz, hauls him against his chest, drags him from the saddle and binds his hands. He drives his prisoner ahead of him and plants his banner.

He meant to bring Khosrow a captive foe: Giv fights to capture rather than to kill, and it costs him his spear and a long exchange. What he is preserving is the king’s right to judge: the blood of Siavash asks for an execution, not a death in the line. It is the only combat of the eleven whose object is a living man.

C3.31Guraza Battles Siamak

Guraza and Siamak charge with spears, then with gorzes, until thirst and exhaustion bring them both to the ground. They grapple, and Guraza throws Siamak and breaks his bones. He binds the corpse across its horse, leads it to the height and prays for the king.

They both dismounted, grappled on the plain: Alone among the eleven, this fight is settled with bare hands: the weapons fail and the two men wrestle. On koshti and the wrestlers’ training-house, see I, B8.20. A champion is expected to be able to finish his work without steel, and Ferdowsi gives one pair in the sequence the chance to prove it.

C3.32Foruhil Battles Zangula

Foruhil, the finest bowman in Iran, showers arrows on Zangula and brings down horse and rider with a single shaft. He beheads him, strips the Roman khaftan, ties the head to his saddle, takes the dead man’s charger and climbs the height with his banner.

It pierced both horse and rider in its flight: Foruhil is introduced as the best archer in Iran and then given a shot that proves it: one arrow through horse and man together. Compare Rostam against Ashkabus (I, B13.28), where the horse and the rider take a shaft each. Each champion in this sequence is allowed one signature skill, and the combat is built to turn on it.

C3.33Rohham Battles Barman

Rohham and Barman shatter their bows, then fight with spears and swords. Rohham’s spear takes Barman in the thigh and unhorses him; a second thrust goes through his back. He drags the body head-down for Siavash, binds it on the horse and claims the height.

For Siavash, he dragged him from his place, / Head downward, smearing blood upon the face.: The insult to the body is deliberate and is named as vengeance for Siavash, and head-down across the saddle is how all the Turanian dead travel in this episode. Set it beside Kay Khosrow’s treatment of Piran in C3.47 — musk, camphor, a crown and a throne — and it marks the distance between a soldier’s vengeance and a king’s.

C3.34Bijan Battles Ruyin

Bijan and Ruyin, Piran’s son, gain nothing with their bows. Bijan’s Roman gorz breaks Ruyin’s head and he dies in the saddle thinking of his father. Bijan beheads him, hauls the body up with his kamand and raises his lion banner on the height.

There in the saddle Ruyin gave up life, / Remembering Piran amid the strife.: Ruyin is Piran’s son, and he dies within an hour of his father, who is waiting his own turn on the same field; Piran had already lost his brother Houman to this same Bijan, as his letter in C3.22 reports. Ferdowsi allows the dying man one thought, and makes it a thought of his father.

Before his youth had tasted life’s delight, / He sought a gain, but lost his stake outright.: The narrator breaks in to grieve for an enemy’s son, using the gambling idiom he keeps for lives staked on a battlefield. Of the ten Turanian champions killed in the sequence, Ruyin is the one whose death Ferdowsi pauses over at length — a courtesy the poem pays to the young more readily than to the famous.

C3.35Hajir Battles Sipahram

Hajir faces Sipahram, a kinsman of Afrasiab. Their swords strike sparks until Hajir, calling on the Maker’s name, kills him with one blow to the helmet. He ties the body to his saddle, leads the dead man’s horse away and climbs the height to bless his fortune.

He called upon the Maker’s holy name, / And through the monarch’s fortune struck like flame.: Victory in this sequence is credited twice over, to God and to the king’s fortune, and nearly every one of the eleven winners says so from the hilltop; on the royal farr thought to work through the Shah’s men, see I, A4.1. Hajir’s own name carries a heavier memory: it was his refusal to identify Rostam that set the Sohrab tragedy moving (I, B8.16).

C3.36How Zangeh, Son of Shavaran, Battles Awkhast

Zangeh and the veteran Awkhast batter each other with gorzes until the heat exhausts men and horses alike. They agree to rest, then arm again and fight with spears. Zangeh’s spear flings Awkhast from his horse; he binds him head-down and takes the height.

Let us take rest till strength has been restored, / Then rise and meet each other with the sword.: The two enemies break off, tether their horses, rest, and then arm again — the courtesy between fighting men that the poem calls javānmardi (see I, B8.20). It is the only interval in the eleven combats, and Ferdowsi has the heat force it rather than the men: the plain burns like iron and the horses cannot be made to move.

C3.37Gorgin Battles Andariman

Gorgin and Andariman break their spears, then trade arrows behind wolf-skin shields. Gorgin’s shaft pins Andariman’s Roman helmet to his chest, and a second brings him down. Gorgin cuts off the head, leads away the dead man’s charger and raises his banner.

Gorgin rode ninth to claim revenge in fight: Gorgin has a name to repair. It was his envy that left Bijan in Afrasiab’s pit, and he was put in chains for it and pardoned only after Rostam spoke for him (the tale of Bijan and Manijeh, II, C2). Ferdowsi gives him a clean victory here and says nothing whatever about the past; the reader is expected to supply it.

C3.38Borteh Battles Kuhram

Borteh and Kuhram try the arts of combat and then close with Indian swords. When Kuhram turns away, Borteh’s blow splits him from helmet to chest. He slings the corpse on its Tuzi saddle, climbs the height sword in hand and cries that the Shah has won.

They drew their Indian swords, then closed in fight.: Indian blades were the best that money could buy in Ferdowsi’s world: crucible steel from southern India, exported west for centuries, took a patterned edge that Arabic and Persian poets praise by name. The poem arms its legendary heroes from the trade routes of its own age as readily as from myth.

C3.39Gudarz Battles Piran

With no Turanian left, the two old chiefs fight. Gudarz’s arrow kills Piran’s horse, which falls and breaks his arm; he climbs the hill and refuses quarter. Gudarz follows on foot, takes a khanjar wound in the arm, and kills him with a javelin through the liver.

Piran replied, “Now God forbid that shame: Piran is offered his life and the chance of the Shah’s pardon, and refuses both; he asks only not to be blamed for a death he could not avoid. The poem’s most sympathetic Turanian dies as the Iranians themselves would wish to die, and Kay Khosrow’s lament in C3.47 measures what the war has cost on that side too.

He took the blood the fallen chief had bled, / And drank, and on his face its stain he spread.: Blood-vengeance is completed literally: the avenger tastes his enemy’s blood and marks his own face with it. A few lines later the same man cannot bring himself to cut off the head, and leaves the body lying in the shade of a banner. Ferdowsi sets the two gestures side by side and offers no comment on either.

C3.40Gudarz Returns from Battle

The Iranians come down with their dead and fear Gudarz has fallen, until his banner appears. He tells his story and sends Rohham to fetch Piran’s body untouched. As they reach camp, the watchman on Raibad reports Kay Khosrow approaching with elephants and banners.

Disturb no part about his waist or face.: Gudarz’s order protects the body whose blood he has just drunk: nothing stripped, nothing disarranged, the arms and the banner brought down with it. The corpse is being kept presentable for the Shah, who will bury it with honor in C3.47 — a thing decided here, by a man with a fresh wound in his arm.

An elephant bears up a throne that gleams: War elephants reached Iran from India and were a real part of Sasanian armies, drums and all; Ferdowsi equips the legendary Kayanians with them as a matter of course. The throne carried on an elephant’s back is how a watchman a day’s march away can tell that the Shah himself is coming, and not merely another army.

C3.41Lahhak and Farshidvard Bewail Piran

Turan’s watchman reports the disaster. Lahhak and Farshidvard climb to the lookout, see Piran and the ten dead, and mourn, but remember his last order. The leaderless army debates quarter, flight and battle; the brothers refuse to submit and choose the desert road.

No man of Viseh’s line will then remain: The episode is the extinction of a house. Viseh’s line supplies Piran himself, his brother Houman, killed by Bijan before it opens, Kulbad, Lahhak and Farshidvard, and Piran’s son Ruyin; by the end of C3.45 not one of them is alive. Turan loses its command, not merely a battle, and the rest of the war is fought without it.

The army knew its shepherd lay in death; / His flock was leaderless with his last breath.: The figure has been building. In C3.27 Piran found his wounded men “Like sheep a ravening wolf had ravaged here”; in C3.28 Gudarz charged that the Turanians killed Siavash “Like sheep.” Now the shepherd himself is gone. Ferdowsi moves one image from victim to commander to whole nation within a few chapters.

C3.42Lahhak and Farshidvard Return to Turan

The brothers ride for the desert with ten horsemen, break through an Iranian outpost at the cost of seven Iranian lives, and escape. Gudarz calls for a pursuer; the exhausted army says nothing, until Gostaham, who had been left guarding the camp, volunteers.

Not one among Iran’s worn troops replied: Twice in two chapters Gudarz calls for a volunteer and is met with silence, here and again in C3.43. The army that has just won everything is too tired to mount, and Ferdowsi says so plainly rather than keeping his heroes fresh. That exhaustion is what forces the last act of the episode onto two men.

Then Gostaham alone spoke out that day: Gostaham’s grievance is exact: Gudarz’s own order in C3.26 posted him with the tabiras and the royal tent while eleven other men won names, and he wants his share. The pursuit he asks for nearly kills him and takes four more chapters to resolve — one of Ferdowsi’s quietest demonstrations of what the hunger for a name costs.

C3.43Gostaham Pursues Lahhak and Farshidvard

Afrasiab’s relief force turns back at Daghui on hearing that Piran is dead. Bijan warns Gudarz that Gostaham cannot beat two such chiefs alone, and when nobody else will ride he threatens to cut off his own head until Gudarz angrily lets him go.

The champions’ fight has turned: The thirty thousand horsemen Afrasiab promised in C3.23 reach the plain of Daghui and turn straight around. Ferdowsi times the relief so that it arrives just too late, and the promise made in the second chapter of the episode is cancelled in its fifth from last: the help Piran asked for never touches the story.

He saw his grandfather and cried his name: Three generations stand on this field — Gudarz, his son Giv, and Giv’s son Bijan — and in this chapter the youngest overrules the oldest by threatening his own life, then does the same to his father in C3.44. The Gudarzian household is the poem’s fullest portrait of a family at war, and its arguments are domestic as much as strategic.

C3.44Bijan Follows Gostaham

Giv blocks Bijan’s road and pleads with him; Bijan refuses, invoking Ladan and his debt to Gostaham, and Giv finally blesses him. Beyond the river the two Turks stop in a green meadow, hunt, eat and sleep, with Farshidvard keeping watch.

They lit a fire and ate kabab, then deep / In weariness they turned their heads to sleep.: A running stream, a shaded glade, game, roast meat and sleep: Ferdowsi gives the doomed brothers an hour of ease, and pauses even for a maxim about hunger outlasting both grief and joy. The idyll is a device rather than a digression — it is what makes the killing in the next chapter feel like an intrusion.

Is Ladan’s battle banished from your eyes?: Bijan answers his father with an earlier battle of the vengeance war, where Gostaham stood by him; the friendship that drives C3.44 through C3.46 was made on that field. He also states the poem’s fatalism in its plainest form — what is written cannot be bent by caution — and uses it to justify recklessness, which is not quite what it means.

C3.45The Deaths of Lahhak and Farshidvard

A horse’s neigh betrays the brothers. Gostaham cuts down Farshidvard, then beheads Lahhak after an exchange of arrows that wounds them both. Badly hurt, he reaches a spring, drinks, and lies through the night praying that Bijan will be moved to come and find him.

Then Lahhak’s charger answered with a neigh: A horse gives them away: the third time in this episode that an animal, not a man, decides a fight (see C3.25). The detail is well observed — two hidden riders are betrayed by the one thing they cannot silence — and Farshidvard draws the moral himself a few lines later, that no one has ever outridden his day.

His severed head rolled underfoot, as though / A polo stick had sent it with a blow.: Polo supplies Ferdowsi with one of his standard battlefield images; on the game and its Byzantine name, see I, B9.33. The simile is not merely violent: a ball goes where the mallet sends it, which is exactly the point of the couplet that follows, on fortune casting away the men it reared.

C3.46Bijan Comes upon Gostaham

Bijan finds a riderless horse with its saddle turned, follows its tracks and finds Gostaham by a spring. He binds the wounds with his own shirt, hears his friend’s wishes, kills two fleeing Turks and spares a third to help, loads the dead brothers and starts back.

The saddle and its gear hung upside down: The loose horse with a broken bridle and a turned saddle tells Bijan what has happened before he finds his friend, and then its tracks lead him to the spring. Ferdowsi likes the animal as witness: in this episode horses give warning, give men away, and bring them where they need to go.

I strove with fortune, striving for a name; / I did not pause upon the road to fame.: Gostaham’s concern as he dies is not for life but for the record — that his nām be known and his death not counted a waste (see I, A6.27). He asks besides to be carried to the Shah and to look on his face once; being seen to die in the king’s presence is itself a form of reward in the poem, and in C3.49 he is given more than he asked for.

C3.47Piran Is Honored, and Gurvi Is Slain

Kay Khosrow reaches the field and is met on foot by the whole army with the ten slain. He praises Gudarz, weeps over Piran, has him embalmed and seated crowned in a tomb, then has Gurvi’s sinews drawn joint by joint and his throat cut for Siavash.

Remembering all the kindness Piran showed: The debt is real. Piran sheltered Siavash in Turan and married his daughter Jarireh to him (I, B9.34), and he later saved the infant Kay Khosrow and had him brought up out of Afrasiab’s reach. The Shah weeps for the man who kept him alive and then led armies against him, and lays the change to Ahriman rather than to Piran.

He ordered musk and camphor, pure and fine: The body is embalmed with musk, camphor, ambergris and rosewater, wrapped in brocade from Rum, and seated crowned on a throne inside a built tomb. This is royal honor as the poem’s own age understood it, not Zoroastrian practice, which exposed the dead and gathered the bones afterward; see I, B1.9 on the astōdān.

Then, as men slaughter sheep, they took his head: The words are chosen. Gurvi held Siavash down and cut his throat, and Gudarz had already thrown the comparison at Piran in C3.28: “Like sheep they slew him.” The punishment repeats the crime, the drawing of the sinews is the harshest end the poem gives anyone, and the body goes into the water with a promise that Afrasiab will follow it.

C3.48Turan Seeks Quarter from Kay Khosrow

The Shah rewards his men and gives Isfahan to Gudarz. Piran’s leaderless troops send an envoy to beg quarter, laying Siavash’s death on Ahriman and their own king. Kay Khosrow pardons them; they heap up their arms, swear loyalty, and are settled through his realm.

Or claim a teakwood coffin for my own.: Teak came by sea from India and was prized for resisting rot, so a coffin of it is a rich man’s coffin — which is the point of the wise man’s wager: a crown or a good burial, with nothing in between. Kay Khosrow quotes the lines to explain why he need not punish men whose own deeds have already answered them.

They piled their bargostvans upon the ground: Surrender is enacted rather than stated: helmets off, horse-armor stacked, swords and lances heaped, and the Turanian banners planted round the pile so that their colors now mark a defeat. On the bargostvan, see I, B6.6. The Shah then distributes the men through his own country instead of sending them home to be raised again.

C3.49Bijan Returns with Gostaham

The lookout reports three burdened horses. Bijan brings in the dead brothers and the dying Gostaham, who asks only to see the Shah. Khosrow binds on him an amulet inherited from the first kings; after two weeks he recovers. The Shah then summons his armies against Afrasiab.

From Hushang, Tahmuras, and Jamshid’s reign, / The Shah received a charm that healed all pain.: An heirloom amulet descending from the first kings, worn on the Shah’s own right arm and given away here to a wounded man; on talismans in the poem, see I, A5.7. Beside it stand physicians gathered from Rum, Hind, Chin, Turan and Iran, and the Shah’s own chanted spells. Relic, medicine and prayer work together without any sense of strain.

The wars of Piran now have all been told; / Sing Khosrow’s vengeance, poet, fierce and bold.: Ferdowsi closes one book by naming the next, as he does at the end of Volume I (I, B14.28). What follows is the final war, against Afrasiab in his stronghold — the “king of Gang” of the line above; on that fortress, see I, B9.39.