Notes · Book C4The Final Afrasiab Wars and the Disappearance of Kay Khosrow

C4.1Praise for Sultan Mahmud

Ferdowsi praises Mahmud and his vizier Fazl son of Ahmad, laments his own age and poverty, claims his poem will outlast any building, and turns to Kay Khosrow’s wars, warning that the avenger of Siavash was himself cast off by the world.

For Fazl, son of Ahmad, they are made.: Fazl son of Ahmad is Mahmud’s vizier, and the only man besides the sultan whom Ferdowsi names here as a living patron. A dedication of this kind was normally composed last, when a poem was finished and ready to be presented; the long praise of Mahmud sits at the head of the great war because that is where the poet needed it, not where the story does.

Seven hundred elephants of mighty size: Mahmud’s war elephants were real and famous, the profit of his Indian campaigns, and they were the one thing in his army no rival in Iran could match. Ferdowsi has them in mind through the chapters that follow, where towered elephants stand at the center of Kay Khosrow’s line.

Thus sixty-five long years had passed away: Ferdowsi scatters his own age through the poem — fifty-eight, sixty-five, sixty-six in these few lines alone — and those figures are the main internal evidence for how long the work took him and in what order its parts were written. The complaint of poverty in old age is a convention of the panegyric, but here it is also a date.

I built a lofty palace out of song; / No wind or rain can do its fabric wrong.: The boast that the poem is a building proof against weather is the best-known thing Ferdowsi ever said about his own work. Note where he puts it: immediately after a hundred lines on a patron’s bounty, the lasting thing turns out to be the verse. Compare Horace’s monument more lasting than bronze.

C4.2Kay Khosrow Musters against Afrasiab

With Piran dead, Kay Khosrow calls up the whole realm against Afrasiab. He gives Rostam, Gudarz and Tus three roads to watch, summons every province by letter, and sets out his order of battle: wings, elephants, crossbowmen, spearmen and reserves.

In Pahlavi they wrote to chiefs of fame: Ferdowsi’s Kayanian kings write in Pahlavi, the Middle Persian of the Sasanians, many centuries in the future by the poem’s own reckoning. The anachronism is honest rather than careless: his material reached him through Pahlavi books and their translations, so Pahlavi is simply what an old letter looks like to him. On the Khwadāy-nāmag, see I, A6.7.

The Shah set Tus upon one side to stand: What follows is the longest order of battle in the poem: center, wings, flank guards, elephants, engineers, footmen and reserves, each with its commander and his province named. The nearest thing in another epic is the Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad; on Ferdowsi beside Homer, see I, B9.2.

They set the fighting towers on each beast: The elephant with a wooden tower on its back carrying archers was a real weapon, Indian in origin and in Ferdowsi’s own day the prize of Mahmud’s Indian wars — the seven hundred beasts of II, C4.1. In this book they are not decoration: they hold the road in front of Khosrow’s center, and Afrasiab has to plan around them.

Picked men of Karkh, with arbalists arrayed: Karkh was the great commercial quarter of Baghdad. With Karkh, Rum, Yemen and Kabul all sending contingents, Khosrow’s muster is less a Kayanian army than a review of the world Ferdowsi knew, and the bow-engines that shoot through stone at two farsangs belong to the same world.

C4.3Afrasiab Hears of Piran’s Death

At Baikand, Afrasiab learns that Piran, Lahhak and Farshidvard are dead. He mourns, throws down his crown, swears to live as a soldier until he is avenged, pays his troops, leaves Qarakhan in Bukhara, ferries his army over the Jihun and ranks his sons for battle.

In Pahlavi, Kunduz had been its name: Baikand is usually identified with Paykand, a rich walled town on the road between Bukhara and the Jihun crossing, which the Arab geographers knew as a city of merchants. Ferdowsi likes to gloss a place-name with its older form, as he does here, and to trace its walls back to one of the first kings.

The Zand-Avesta there, in gold encased.: Zand is the Pahlavi commentary on the Avesta, so Zand-Avesta strictly means the scripture together with its gloss. Tradition held that the archetype was written in gold and destroyed by Iskandar. The chronology is the poem’s own: Fereydoon founds a fire-temple and shelves the Avesta many reigns before Zardosht is born to reveal it.

The inner tents were made of leopard hide: Tent walls of leopard skin, and a custom traced to a founder: the poem accounts for a usage by naming the king who began it, as it does for fire and weaving among the first kings. The furnishings also do quiet work, marking Turan’s court as splendid and foreign beside Iran’s brocade.

C4.4Kay Khosrow Hears of Afrasiab’s Advance

Khosrow learns that Afrasiab has crossed the Jihun and camped on the Iranian bank. He reinforces Balkh and Zam, marches toward Khwarazm, digs a trench and floods it, and the two armies stand facing each other for two days while the astrologers fail to read the outcome.

Dehestan lay left, the river right: Dehestan is usually identified with Dahistan, the frontier district east of the Caspian around the lower Atrak, long a march against the steppe. With Khwarazm ahead and the Jihun on the right, the pursuit is being laid out on real ground, however epic the distances become.

When Sol shone bright from Aries in the sky: The sun enters Aries at Nowruz, so the campaign opens with the new year. Ferdowsi keeps the clock running by the zodiac through this book: Taurus and then Cancer mark later days of fighting in II, C4.10, so the two kings stand against each other from spring into high summer.

With astrolabes they searched the turning sky: The astrolabe, a Greek instrument perfected by Muslim astronomers, is one of the poem’s cheerful anachronisms. The touch worth having is the failure: in a poem where dreams and horoscopes are generally right, the astrologers of both armies study the sky and can tell their kings nothing at all.

C4.5Shideh Appears before His Father

Shideh urges his father to fight at once and offers to break Iran himself. Afrasiab praises the dead Piran, counts what his loss has cost Turan, and prefers single combats to a general battle. Shideh asks to go first, and his brothers forbid the king to fight.

What need have armies now of starry lore?: Shideh’s soldierly contempt for divination answers the baffled astrologers of the previous chapter, and it is the wrong lesson to draw, since his own stars are bad. Ferdowsi regularly lets a character argue against the machinery of his poem, and then shows what the argument is worth.

No soldier, nor a man of faith, thinks right / That you should be the first to seek the fight.: The Shahnameh holds that a king does not fight duels; that is what champions are for. The objection is made three times in this book — here by Afrasiab’s sons, by Khosrow’s own troops at II, C4.8, and by Rostam at II, C4.27 — and Khosrow overrides it once before submitting to it.

C4.6Afrasiab Sends Envoys to Khosrow

Afrasiab sends Shideh with terms: kinship, all his treasure and withdrawal from Iranian land, or else combat between the kings, or with Shideh, or three days of escalating battle. Turkish outriders attack Iran’s pickets before Shideh can stop them, and Gharan comes out to hear the message.

Siavash was not guiltless when he died: Afrasiab’s defense changes with each embassy. Here the victim was at fault; at II, C4.19 the Div did the deed and the king was only its pretext; at II, C4.27 the fault is Siavash’s again. Ferdowsi is building a man who cannot settle on his own version of the thing he did.

The second day, when cocks proclaim the light: The proposal is a formal escalation: first the two kings, then chosen champions, then a general engagement on the third day. Staged fighting of this kind, with the terms fixed by envoys beforehand, is the same protocol as the paired duels of the Twelve Rukhs earlier in this volume.

C4.7Khosrow Replies to Afrasiab

Khosrow refuses the treasure and the delay, accepts Shideh’s challenge for the morning, and sends word that Shideh has come to his own grave. Afrasiab, hearing the answer, remembers the dream he had long kept secret and begs his son for two days’ postponement.

Remembering his dream of days gone by.: The dream is the one Ferdowsi gave him in the Siavash book, which his priests read as a warning that the prince’s death would bring his own destruction. He has kept it to himself ever since, and Khosrow’s answer brings it back. What unmans him is not the odds but the interpretation.

Struck like a sheep beneath the murderer’s blow: Cutting a throat like a sheep’s is the poem’s fixed phrase for the murder of Siavash, and Khosrow uses it again at II, C4.20. On the blood of Siavash and what grew where it was spilled, see I, B9.55.

C4.8Kay Khosrow Battles Shideh

At dawn Shideh calls Khosrow out. The Shah arms despite his soldiers’ protest, leaves Rostam in command if he falls, and rides with Shideh to a waste in Khwarazm. They fight with lance, gorz and sword until noon, and then Shideh proposes wrestling on foot.

They reached dry rocks where lions would not tread: The duel is fought far from both armies, on ground where nothing lives, with only the standard-bearers allowed near and a pact that no one will intervene. Taking the combat off the field is what makes it a contest rather than a skirmish, and it lets the loser’s body be carried back with honor.

But let us, Shah, contend upon our feet: Wrestling is the last resort of Shahnameh duels, once lance, gorz and sword have been used up; on koshti, see I, B8.20. Shideh’s real object is the pause, since his horse is finished and his hands are failing. Khosrow sees it, objects that no king of Kayanian blood has fought on foot, and then does it.

C4.9Khosrow Slays Shideh

Khosrow lifts Shideh and throws him, breaking his back, then stabs him through the heart. He mourns him, orders a royal washing and burial, and sends the interpreter back as a witness. Afrasiab tears his hair, and his nobles swear a new vengeance.

With musk, rosewater, fragrant balm, be sure: Musk, rosewater and camphor are the regular equipment of an honorable death in the poem, and the golden torque marks the dead man as a king’s son. On the dakhmeh and the awkwardness of such burials for a faith that will not have the earth polluted, see I, B12.25.

His interpreter looked toward the plain: Envoys travel with an interpreter, a reminder that Turan and Iran are not assumed to share a language. Khosrow’s instruction to him — report everything you saw of me — is policy rather than courtesy: the man is being sent back to his king as a witness.

C4.10The Armies Meet in Battle

The armies join. Gharan wears down Jahan, Gostaham drives on the right, and days of slaughter follow. Afrasiab spreads his ranks to get clear of the towered elephants. Khosrow prays behind his lines, kills Ila and unhorses Ustukila, and Afrasiab is pulled away at dusk.

He dismounted there and thanked the Maker’s grace: Khosrow slips behind his own lines to pray face down in the dust before the fighting, and does it again at II, C4.15 and II, C4.21. The pattern is the argument of the whole book: this king’s victories are granted rather than won, and the wind that finally breaks Turan is an answer to a prayer like this one.

Leave tower and elephant, take open ground.: Afrasiab’s order is good tactics. Elephants are formidable head-on and useless once an enemy declines the frontal press, so he pulls his men out of the crush, widens his front and works around the beasts. Ferdowsi rarely gives a battle this much staff work; this book is the exception.

C4.11Afrasiab Is Put to Flight

Afrasiab packs up at midnight, recrosses the Jihun and leaves his camp standing. At dawn the Iranian outposts find no enemy. Khosrow prostrates himself in thanks, takes the abandoned booty, and waits five days to bury his dead before setting out again.

The sixth is Ormozd, blessed in sacred lore.: Every one of the thirty days of the Zoroastrian month has its own name, and the first of them is Ormozd. Khosrow is not counting five days at random: he is waiting out the month so as to set off on a blessed day. On Ormozd as a name of God, see I, A9.2; on the day and month names, see I, A7.1.

For five days on that battlefield they sought: The five days are spent washing and burying the Iranian dead, the pause the poem allows after nearly every great battle. Compare the truce for burial in the Iliad; on Ferdowsi’s care for the dead after a victory, see I, B13.20.

C4.12Khosrow Sends News of Victory to Kavus

Khosrow has a dispatch written to Kavus: three battles fought on the plain of Khwarazm, three hundred heads and two hundred captive chiefs sent to court, Afrasiab’s brother and son dead, and the king himself in flight with the Iranians behind him.

Three hundred severed heads I send as signs: Sending heads and captive chiefs back as proof of a victory was real practice, not epic color; heads traveled to caliphs’ and sultans’ courts in exactly this way. The letter is a dispatch, and the heads are its evidence.

From fair Iran I reached Farab’s broad land: Farab is a real name on this ground: one Farab lay on the Jihun opposite Amuy, at the ferry the armies have just used, and another on the Syr Darya, remembered as the birthplace of the philosopher al-Farabi. The first suits the line of march, though the poem’s distances remain its own.

C4.13Afrasiab Flees to Gang-Behesht

Afrasiab reaches Qarakhan’s army and mourns his dead. His counselors advise withdrawal across the Gulzaryun, and he goes to Gang-Behesht, where he hunts, feasts and drinks among gardens until his agents report that Khosrow has crossed the Jihun.

With hawks and cheetahs, rest from anxious thought.: Hunting cheetahs, carried hooded to the field and slipped at gazelle, were kept by Iranian and Indian courts for centuries, and hawks were flown beside them. Three days of this is how Afrasiab rests between defeats; Khosrow will do the same once he has won (II, C4.25).

At Gang-Behesht, then take rest from all strain: Behesht, ‘paradise’, comes through Pahlavi wahišt from Avestan vahišta, ‘best’: the best existence, heaven. The English word paradise descends instead from the Persian for a walled garden, on which see I, B7.1. On the older stronghold Gang and its name, see I, B9.39.

C4.14Khosrow Crosses the Jihun

Khosrow crosses the Jihun, relieves the ruined marches of Sughd and rests a month. He orders mercy for Turks who submit and destruction for those who fight, and his troops raze strongholds for a hundred farsangs. At Gang, Afrasiab’s elders can advise only war.

When Kay Khosrow had crossed Jihun’s wide sweep: The Jihun is the Oxus, the Amu Darya. Muslim geographers called it Jayhun after Gihon, one of the four rivers of Eden in Genesis, as they called the Syr Darya Sayhun. The crossing is the hinge of the whole book: beyond this water Khosrow is no longer defending Iran but conquering Turan.

A home for owls, by ruin long defaced.: In Persian the owl is the bird of ruins and of ill luck, and ‘a home for owls’ is the standard phrase for a place gone back to waste. Ferdowsi applies it here to country wrecked by Iran’s own long war of vengeance, not by the enemy.

Chiefs, priests, and marzbans counted row by row.: The marzbān, ‘warden of the march’, was a real office: the Sasanians posted marzbans with troops of their own on the dangerous frontiers. Ferdowsi counts them into an army’s ranks as naturally as he counts its priests.

C4.15Khosrow’s Second Battle with Afrasiab

Both armies form up at Gulzaryun and fight until they can barely stand. Khosrow prays face down behind his lines, and a wind rises that drives the dust into the Turanians, who break. Afrasiab beheads his own runaways and waits for morning.

At once a furious wind from heaven rose: The battle is decided by weather, directly after the king’s prayer. Ferdowsi keeps his miracles small and physically plausible — a wind throwing the dust of a dry plain into one army’s eyes — but the sequence is unmistakable, and this is the nearest the long campaign comes to a single decisive stroke.

But God had other purposes in view: Ferdowsi often closes a chapter by telling us that the careful arrangements just described will come to nothing. The habit costs him surprise and buys him dread: we watch Afrasiab set his line for a morning we already know will not arrive as he means it to.

C4.16Gang-Behesht Shelters Afrasiab

News comes that Gostaham has destroyed Qarakhan’s force by night and Rostam has scattered another. Afrasiab marches to surprise Rostam, finds him armed and watching, and on a chief’s advice shuts himself into Gang-Behesht with his treasure, family and troops.

They kept no mounted outposts on the ground: The chapter turns on picket duty. Gostaham destroys Qarakhan because the Turks posted no mounted outposts; Afrasiab’s own night attack on Rostam fails because Rostam has posted his, and the chargers are heard neighing in the dark. On the night raid, shabikhun, see I, A6.21.

Gang measures eight farsangs in length, and four: Eight farsangs by four, springs and pools as long as an arrow’s flight, walls no eagle clears, a view over twenty farsangs: Gang-Behesht belongs to the poem’s type of the perfect enclosed city, like Siavash-Gard (I, B10.18) and the older Gang (I, B9.39). Each is built as a refuge and each is lost.

C4.17Afrasiab Writes to the Faghfoor

Afrasiab asks the Faghfoor of Chin for his presence or his troops, then arms Gang-Behesht with catapults, crossbows, stone-throwers and iron claws on spears, paying and equipping his men well. His work done, he feasts for two weeks with music and wine.

The shrewd Jathaliq raised along the wall: Jathaliq is the Arabic title of the catholicos, head of the Eastern Church (see I, B14.20); here it stands as the name of the Christian engineer who builds Afrasiab’s artillery. Roman captives as master builders of walls and bridges is a genuine Sasanian memory, and the poem keeps it.

Crossbows and shields of rhinoceros hide: Shields of rhinoceros hide came from India and were genuinely prized, being light and very hard to pierce. The rest of the inventory — crossbows, and iron claws lashed to long spears to pluck men off the scaling ladders — is the equipment of an eleventh-century siege, reported by someone who had heard it described accurately.

C4.18Kay Khosrow Reaches Gang-Behesht

Khosrow arrives, laughs at the fortress, admires its beauty and gives thanks. He ranks his army around it under Rostam, Fariborz and Gudarz, orders the roads blocked and the ramparts thrown into the river, and recalls Kavus’s saying that the feud will outlive them all.

He laughed and circled all the fortress round: Khosrow laughs when Shideh challenges him (II, C4.8) and laughs again at the sight of his enemy’s walls. It is not merriment. Ferdowsi gives this king a cold amusement at other men’s confidence, and it is the closest thing to arrogance he allows him before the end of his reign.

For full six thousand years, year after year.: The figure may echo Zoroastrian reckoning, in which the history of the world runs in ages of three thousand years, twelve thousand in all, to the end-time; the poem does not say so, and six thousand may be no more than a round number for time out of mind. Read against that scheme, Kavus’s saying gives the feud between Iran and Turan the length of half of creation. On the Resurrection that closes the count, see I, B12.22.

C4.19Afrasiab Sends Jahan to Khosrow

Jahan comes out of the fortress as envoy and is received with honor. Afrasiab’s message praises Khosrow, blames the Div for Siavash’s murder, laments the ruined cities, warns of winter and of fresh armies, offers all his treasure for peace, and threatens to vanish beyond Kimak.

The wicked Div, not I, performed the deed: Now the Div did it and Afrasiab was merely the occasion — a different plea from the one he sent at II, C4.6, where the fault was Siavash’s. Khosrow answers it at II, C4.20 by naming the others who blamed a Div when there was nothing left to say.

Across the waters of Kimak I go: The Kimek were a real Turkic people of the Irtysh country, at the outer edge of what Muslim geographers could describe. Afrasiab is threatening to step off the map altogether, and the threat is not idle: he will spend the rest of this book as a fugitive.

Cold days confront us when the soldiers’ hands: The soundest argument in the letter is the weather. The campaigning season is closing, the ground will freeze, and a besieging army in winter suffers more than a garrison does. The poem concedes the point without saying so, since the war does stop for the winter (II, C4.25).

C4.20Kay Khosrow Answers Jahan

Khosrow answers point by point: fair words and a false heart. He recalls his mother dragged from her bower, the beating meant to kill him unborn, his childhood among shepherds, the murders of Siavash, Nohzar and Aghriras. Nothing is left but the sword.

And sent me, lions’ food, to shepherds’ fold.: The royal child handed to shepherds is one of the oldest patterns in the world’s stories: Cyrus in Herodotus, Sargon in his basket, Moses, Romulus. Khosrow’s own account keeps every element of it — the order to destroy the child, the herdsman’s fold, and the royalty that shows through anyway.

So Zahhak spoke, and Jamshid spoke the same: Khosrow’s theology is exact: a Div can tempt but cannot compel, so blaming one is the standard excuse of a man already lost. The Gathas make the choice between the two spirits the one thing nobody can do on another’s behalf, and the poem has taken that seriously.

C4.21Gang-Behesht Falls to Kay Khosrow

Khosrow assaults the fortress on four sides, ringing it with a trench and hundreds of engines. His miners undercut the walls, prop them with timber soaked in naphtha and fire it. The ramparts fall, Rostam storms the breach, Jahan and Garsivaz are taken alive, and the city is plundered.

Two hundred arradas stood at each gate: The manjanīq and the lighter arrāda were the standard stone-throwing engines of Ferdowsi’s day, worked in batteries by trained crews. Nothing in this siege is legendary equipment: it is the artillery of the eleventh century, brought up against a mythical wall.

On every timber naphtha then was spread: This is the real way a wall came down before gunpowder: dig under the foundation, prop the undercut with timber, soak the props in naphtha, set them alight and let the wall drop into its own mine. Naphtha from the surface seeps of Iran and Iraq was a standard siege material, and the poet describes its use correctly.

C4.22Afrasiab Flees from Gang-Behesht

From his palace roof Afrasiab watches two-thirds of his men die and his city burn. He takes leave of his hall and escapes with two hundred chiefs through a secret tunnel. Khosrow takes the golden throne, searches the city and questions his prisoners without learning anything.

And bade farewell to throne and royal power: Speaking to a building one is about to lose is a set piece in the poem, and the building never answers; on this recurring lament over palaces, see I, B9.39. Afrasiab asks when he will look on his hall again in joy, and the narrator has already told us what the answer is.

A passage underneath the earth was laid.: The tunnel is Afrasiab’s last piece of craft, and it points where he is going. From a palace with a hidden passage he will come at the end of this book to a cave with a hidden mouth, and be run to ground there. For this king, royalty has become a matter of holes in the ground.

C4.23Khosrow Spares Afrasiab’s Family

Khosrow sets Mobadan to guard Afrasiab’s palace and women. His troops mutter that he behaves like a guest in his father’s murderer’s house and expect a massacre; but when the queen and her daughters come out pleading, he spares them all and sends them home in peace.

Nor let his women’s voices reach the street: A conqueror’s first act was normally to take the defeated king’s women, who counted almost as part of the regalia; on the shabestān, see I, A6.14. Khosrow instead posts guards to keep noise and even daylight away from it. His own army reads the restraint as weakness, which is the point of putting their grumbling in.

The royal matron came before the throne: Royal women pleading before a victor is one of the poem’s recurring scenes, and it usually succeeds: compare Sindokht going alone to Sam (I, A8.15). The queen’s plea is skillfully built — she disowns Afrasiab’s crimes, says she mourned Siavash herself, and ends by claiming kinship with the man she is addressing.

If done to us, we must not do to you.: The negative form of the Golden Rule, which Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and Islamic ethics all state in nearly these words. Ferdowsi gives it to a king who has every conventional right to a sack, and makes it the reason there is not one.

C4.24Kay Khosrow Exhorts the Iranians

Khosrow gives Turan to his men as a country to be governed rather than wasted: no killing of the innocent, no harm to women, no seizing of private property. He distributes the captured treasure, grants quarter to the Turks who come in, and receives the submission of their chiefs.

Respect another’s wealth; for greed can make: The speech is a mirror for princes of the kind Pahlavi literature collected as andarz, counsel: protect the weak, leave private property alone, do not turn a thriving realm into barren sand. Ferdowsi’s own politics are audible in it, and so is the practical point that a wasted province pays no tribute.

Except Afrasiab’s private hoard alone: Khosrow gives away all Turan’s treasure and holds back only Afrasiab’s personal hoard, which no one may seize or even reckon. It is not greed: while the man is alive the vendetta is unfinished, and his treasure is not yet spoil.

C4.25Kay Khosrow Writes Kavus of His Victory

Khosrow writes to Kavus of Gang’s fall, the wind at Gulzaryun and the numbers of the dead, and promises further news. Then he turns to wine and hunting until spring returns, while his spies search every quarter for the vanished Afrasiab.

So passed the time till spring adorned the earth: The war stops for the winter, exactly as Afrasiab’s letter predicted it must (II, C4.19), and Ferdowsi fills the gap with a conventional spring passage. It is the only quiet season in this long book, and he marks it with color and scent instead of casualty figures.

With hawk and cheetah he pursued the band.: The king hunting with hawk and cheetah, cup in hand and singers near, is the standing image of legitimate kingship at rest: the scene on Sasanian silver plates and in every later painting of a royal picnic. Ferdowsi allows it to Khosrow only after Gang has fallen. On the cheetahs, see II, C4.13.

C4.26Afrasiab Returns with the Faghfoor of Chin

Afrasiab comes back from Khutan with the Faghfoor’s army and Piran’s treasure, and the Turks Khosrow had spared rise again. Khosrow leaves Gudarz to hold the country, marches out, and after a week the two armies form up against each other.

Hang him alive upon the gibbet high: Hanging a traitor alive and head downward was a real penalty, not an invention; on the gallows, see I, B13.2. The order stands immediately beside its opposite — harm no guiltless person, weak or meek — which is how the poem defines just rule: exact terror for treachery and none at all for anyone else.

Upon my throne I slept in happy rest;: Afrasiab has lost his city, his brother, two sons and his treasure, and the sight of an army drawn up in line makes him cheerful again. Ferdowsi gives his villain a soldier’s temperament, which is a large part of why the pursuit of him can carry a whole book.

C4.27Afrasiab’s Message to Kay Khosrow

Afrasiab’s envoys count the dead of a thousand farsangs, offer to resign Turan entirely, plead kinship and blame Siavash, and challenge Khosrow to single combat far from both armies. Khosrow is tempted, but Rostam tells him a Shah does not duel and urges a full assault.

Now sixty years have passed across my life,: The poem’s chief villain reckons his fighting life in sixty years; the poet has just counted his own the same way (II, C4.1). Neither figure need be exact, and both are doing the same work: age offered as a claim on the hearer’s patience.

It shames a Shah to enter single fight,: Rostam repeats the objection Afrasiab’s sons made to their father at II, C4.5, and adds the practical reason: terms sworn between two kings would bind an army that has agreed to nothing. Khosrow, who accepted such a challenge from Shideh, now takes the advice.

C4.28The Iranians and Turanians Fight

Khosrow refuses the duel and attacks. The two armies fight all day without result. Expecting a night raid, he digs a trench, forbids fires and bells, and hides Rostam on the plain and Tus in the hills to take Afrasiab from behind if he comes.

To Siavash he swore a greater vow;: Breaking a sworn covenant is the gravest form of lying in Zoroastrian thought (see I, B9.28), and Khosrow’s refusal to negotiate rests on it: Afrasiab swore to Siavash and broke it, so no later oath of his can be accepted. The war goes on because a promise has been made worthless.

Let not the sound of bells reach any ear.: Camp fires and the bells of camels and horses are what betray a position at night, so both are silenced while the trench is dug and the two flanking forces move out unseen. Khosrow’s method throughout this book is to assume the raid and prepare the counter-raid.

C4.29Afrasiab’s Night Attack Fails

Afrasiab attacks by night, but Khosrow has left his camp dark as bait: the raiders founder in the trench and are cut apart. Next day a dust-storm blinds the Turanians, Afrasiab hides his black banner and flees, and his abandoned army surrenders.

Then rose a mighty blast with deafening sound,: Ferdowsi has it both ways. Khosrow has prepared the ground with care — trench, unlit camp, two flanking forces held back — and then a storm arrives to blind the Turanians and tear the helmets off their heads. Afrasiab’s own verdict on the night is that no one escapes the snare of the heavens. The poet lets competence and fortune arrive in the same hour, and gives the credit to the second.

He sought a hidden place, withdrawn from sight,: The first of many. After each victory in this book Khosrow goes off alone to pray where neither man nor beast can hear him, and the habit grows through the crossing of the sea until it finally empties his court (II, C4.47). Ferdowsi begins the story of the king who leaves the world inside the story of the king who is winning it.

The rocks, like jujubes, gleamed a bloody red.: The jujube (onnāb), a small oval fruit that dries to a dark glossy red, is the usual Persian comparison for a deep red, and normally for lips. Ferdowsi turns the love-poet’s color onto blood-slicked stones.

C4.30The Faghfoor Sends Word to Khosrow

Hearing of Khosrow’s victory, the Khan and the Faghfoor regret the help they gave Afrasiab and send lavish gifts to buy pardon. Khosrow keeps the treasure and returns a warning to shut their borders; the Faghfoor at once sends word to the fugitive to keep away.

Let Afrasiab never come by night,: A courtesy with a blade in it. The Faghfoor has sent treasure to be forgiven for backing Afrasiab, and gets back not thanks but instructions: do not let him near you in your sleep. The threat is left for the hearer to complete, and the Faghfoor completes it correctly, warning Afrasiab off his frontier within the night.

Gold coins, unpierced gems, and wealth beyond measure.: Unpierced is the point. A gem or pearl not yet drilled for stringing is worth more than one already set, and nāsofteh, ‘unbored’, is the Persian byword for whatever is untouched and beyond price. The Faghfoor is sending the highest grade of apology available.

C4.31Afrasiab Crosses the Sea

Hunted across Chin, Afrasiab reaches the Sea of Zereh and forces a crossing no sailor has made, taking refuge in Gangdezh. Khosrow resolves to follow him by way of Chin and Makran; his chiefs dread the water until Rostam argues them into it.

Blessed is he whom waters overthrow.: Afrasiab would rather drown than be taken, so that no enemy can lay hands even on his body. The wish is granted in the cruelest available form: he will indeed hide in deep water, and be hauled out of it alive on a cord (II, C4.44) to be killed on the shore.

I am now seventy-eight; through all my days,: The old sailor’s testimony sets the scale of everything that follows. The Sea of Zereh of Volume I (see I, B12.12) has become an ocean that takes six or seven months to cross and that no ship is known to have crossed at all. From here to the end of the war the poem’s geography is the geography of the world’s edge.

C4.32Khosrow Sends Spoils and Captives to Kavus

Khosrow empties Afrasiab’s treasury and sends the spoil, the women of his household, Garsivaz and Jahan in fetters and a thousand hostages to Kavus under Giv’s escort, with a letter reporting the siege. Kavus praises God, houses the captives, and loads Giv with gifts.

With paper and fine silk from Chin brought near.: Paper reached Iran from China by way of Samarkand, and in Ferdowsi’s day the best sheets were still called Chinese or Samarkandi. The Kayanian chancery is writing on the finest stock an eleventh-century scribe could order. On the praise of God with which every royal letter in the poem opens, see I, B12.20.

The ant and elephant alike He made,: The ant is this book’s measure of justice. God makes ant and elephant with equal care here; Khosrow forbids his army to bruise an ant’s foot when it enters Gangdezh (II, C4.37); and Soroush tells him to choose a successor who would not hurt one (II, C4.50). Ferdowsi is the most quoted source in Persian for the ant as the smallest creature a just man must still consider.

The lamb and leopard share one watering place.: The formula for a peace so complete that predator and prey no longer need fear each other; compare the wolf and the lamb of Isaiah. In the Iranian version it is the justice of a living king, and not the end of the world, that quiets the animals at the waterhole.

C4.33The Shah’s Answer to Khosrow

Kavus writes back rejoicing, rehearses Afrasiab’s crimes and urges that the man be left no refuge anywhere. Khosrow feasts three days, garrisons Gang-Behesht under Gostaham, and marches for Chin, stopping in Siavash’s garden to swear he will spill Afrasiab’s blood where his father’s was spilled.

A brother-killer and a regicide,: Afrasiab’s crimes are read out three times in this book, always in the same order: Aghriras, Nohzar, Siavash. Kavus lists them in this letter, Hohm throws them at him in the cave (II, C4.42), and Khosrow recites them with the sword already drawn (II, C4.44). The repetition works like a formal indictment, so that the killing at the end reads as a sentence rather than a murder.

Like water, here where Siavash once bled.: The vow is kept, but not here. Afrasiab dies half a world away on the shore of a lake in Azerbaijan, and Siavash-Gard gets only Khosrow’s tears when he passes through it again (II, C4.38). On the basin held to catch Siavash’s blood, and the plant that grew where a drop fell, see I, B9.55.

C4.34Khosrow’s Embassy to the Faghfoor and Makran

Khosrow demands supplies and free passage from the Khan, the Faghfoor and the king of Makran. Chin submits and entertains him three months with swept roads and daily gifts; Makran’s king answers with defiance, and in the fourth month Khosrow rides against him.

Send food to feed the army I command;: The war with Makran is a quarrel about logistics. What Khosrow requires of the rulers along his line of march is transit and fodder, and his argument is frankly put: an army that is not fed will feed itself on the country. Ferdowsi understands that the hard problem in a campaign of this size is supply, not courage.

It first beholds our kingdom with its eyes.: A boast drawn from the map: Makran lies toward the eastern edge of the world Ferdowsi’s kings recognize, so the sun reaches it before it reaches them. Sunrise as a title-deed is a standing formula of royal self-praise, and this is nearly the last thing the king of Makran says before he loses both kingdom and life.

C4.35Khosrow Battles the King of Makran

A last embassy fails and Makran’s king takes the field with two hundred elephants. He falls in the melee; Khosrow forbids any dishonor to the body, halts the sack and pardons the townspeople. After a year in Makran he leaves Ashkash in command and marches for the sea.

Never shame the kingly dead.: The rule that will shortly be tested. A crowned body is inviolable even in an enemy, and mutilating it is Ahriman’s work; Khosrow has this one perfumed, covered with brocade and given a tomb, still in its wounded jowshan. Nine chapters later he cuts his own grandfather’s throat with his own hand on a lake shore (II, C4.44).

He brought two hundred elephants to fight;: War elephants enter the poem from the east, and Makran, on the road toward Sind, is within reach of elephant country. Their real value was as a moving wall that broke a charge and terrified horses that had never smelled them, and Ferdowsi gives them to the armies of the Indian marches throughout, and later to the Sasanians.

Along the desert, now a path of green.: The desert flowers for a just king. In Iranian thought fertility follows righteous rule as closely as drought follows tyranny, so a green Makran with water standing on the ground is a verdict on the chapter just past, in which Khosrow stopped the plundering and pardoned the people who came to his gate.

C4.36Kay Khosrow Crosses the Sea

Khosrow provisions his fleet for a year and prays before sailing. The crossing takes seven months, past sea-creatures of every hybrid shape, with no contrary wind. Landing, he sets Giv over the country, receives its kings, learns that Afrasiab is at Gang, and marches there.

They saw both lions and bulls within the wave;: A catalogue of sea-marvels: a fish’s body under a leopard’s head, hands where feet should be, hair hanging like kamands, wool like a sheep’s. This is the stuff of the Arabic and Persian books on the wonders of creation, and Ferdowsi almost never indulges it. He allows it here because the fleet is past the edge of the known world, where marvels are the proper furniture.

Would bring the north wind’s driving, wayward blast.: The sea in these lines has a calendar: six months in which a ship may sail, then a wind in the seventh that turns the sails and drives her where no sailor wants to go. Navigation in the Indian Ocean did run on a pattern of reversing seasonal winds, and the detail has the ring of sailors’ lore rather than invention, though the name the poem gives the place the wind drives them to is its own.

C4.37Kay Khosrow Reaches Gangdezh

Weeping at the walls his father raised, Khosrow enters Gangdezh, but Afrasiab has slipped away by night. The search kills many townspeople and finds nothing. Khosrow lingers a year in the gardens until his chiefs press him homeward; he appoints a governor and goes.

It was Siavash who built this mighty place,: Siavash founded two cities in his exile, and both are called his son’s inheritance: Siavash-Gard, where he was killed (see I, B10.18), and this Gangdezh beyond the sea, the walled paradise of Zoroastrian tradition (see I, B9.39). Khosrow weeps at the wall of the one here and mourns on the murder-ground of the other in the next chapter, and the poem calls each of them his father’s city.

They slew full many innocents that day,: Ferdowsi records the contradiction and makes no remark on it. Khosrow has entered the town having just forbidden his men to cause pain to an ant’s foot; the hunt for Afrasiab kills a great many of its people and does not find him. The poet’s habit is to set the two lines side by side and leave the arithmetic to the reader.

C4.38Khosrow Returns to His Father’s City

Khosrow recrosses the sea in seven months, is met by Ashkash in Makran and by Rostam near Chin, and comes to Siavash-Gard, where he mourns on the ground of the murder and renews his vow. At Gang-Behesht he prays a whole night for word of Afrasiab.

In Sapandarmad’s month, on Ard’s bright day.: Every day of the Zoroastrian month carries a divinity’s name (see I, B9.43). Sapandarmad is the last month of the year, and Ard is generally identified with Ashi, the being who apportions reward. Khosrow reaches the ground where his father was killed at the turn of the year, on the day of recompense.

He tore his face and breast in bitter woe;: The gestures are formal and still recognizable: the mourner tears cheeks and breast and pours dust on his own head. Ferdowsi gives them to kings without any embarrassment. Grief in the Shahnameh is performed, loudly and in public, and a king who failed to perform it would be suspect.

C4.39Khosrow’s Return from Turan

Khosrow leaves Gostaham to govern from Chin’s sea to Kibchak and starts home with a treasure-train ten days long. He halts at Chakh, Sughd and Bukhara, weeps at an ancient fire temple, crosses the Jihun, and moves by Balkh, Nishapur and Rey toward Pars.

Tur, son of Fereydoon, had raised that place,: Khosrow has just finished destroying Turan, and on the road home he stops to weep at a fire temple founded by Turan’s own ancestor, and scatters silver and gems on its flame. The war was over a murder, not a religion. Tur’s foundation is still a house of the Fire, and the conqueror endows it.

Then toward Nishapur the monarch led: The homeward march follows the real road: Chakh and Sughd, Bukhara, the crossing of the Jihun, Balkh, Talikan and Marvrud, Nishapur, Rey. This is the great Khorasan highway, and for its last stages it runs through Ferdowsi’s own country — Tus lies a short ride off it, and he does not name it.

C4.40Kay Khosrow Returns to His Grandfather

Kavus comes out of the city to meet his grandson and the two weep together. After a week of feasting and the paying of the army, Khosrow admits he cannot find Afrasiab; Kavus proposes prayer, and they spend a month at the fire of Azargashasp.

Do not suppose to fire their worship strayed.: The narrator steps forward to defend his characters against his own readers. Muslim Iran called Zoroastrians fire-worshippers, and Ferdowsi will not let the charge stand against these two kings: the Fire is where they turn to pray, not what they pray to. It is among the plainest statements in the poem of his sympathy for the old religion.

To scatter precious jewels upon the flame.: Gems and gold are showered on the Fire three times in this book. The great temples lived on royal endowment, so a king’s gift is at once an act of worship and a public accounting for a victory; the priests are robed and paid out of the same treasure, and the poor of the city after them.

C4.41Hohm Captures Afrasiab

Starving and sleepless, Afrasiab hides in a cave near Barda. The hermit Hohm, of Fereydoon’s line, hears a lament come up out of the mountain, climbs down after dark, wrestles the fugitive to the ground, binds his arms and drags him away.

The name of that illustrious man was Hohm,: Hohm is Avestan Haoma, at once the sacred plant of the Zoroastrian offering and the priest-god pressed in the ritual. The Avesta praises Haoma for having seized and bound the Turanian Frangrasyan — Afrasiab — and the mountain ascetic of this chapter, who wrestles him down and ties him with a cord, is that hymn walking about in the poem. It is one of the least altered pieces of Avestan myth anywhere in the Shahnameh.

His kamand served in place of sacred cord;: The line is precise about the substitution. Hohm loosens the woolen girdle he prays in — on the kusti, see I, B1.10 — and takes his kamand instead, so that the binding is done with a horseman’s working rope and not with a holy thing. The gesture makes the hermit briefly a warrior, which is how he is described in the next line.

Lay Hang Afrasiab, his refuge here.: The line does not describe the cave so much as name it: Hang-e Afrāsiāb, Afrasiab’s Lair, as though Ferdowsi were repeating a place-name his source already knew, and hang is usually taken as a hole or den in rock. The man has ruled from Chin to the Jihun, and the last address the poem gives him is a hollow in a hillside where no hawk flies.

C4.42Afrasiab Escapes from Hohm

Afrasiab pleads his kinship and his ruin until Hohm, in pity, loosens the cord; he twists free and vanishes into the lake. Gudarz, riding by, takes him for a fisherman, hears the whole story, prays at the fire, and carries word to Kavus and Khosrow.

I am the seed of mighty Fereydoon;: The claim is true, and it is what makes this war a killing inside one family. Tur and Iraj were both sons of Fereydoon, so Afrasiab and Kay Khosrow come down from the same king. He presses the kinship at every turn now: on Hohm here, on his brother in the water (II, C4.43), on Khosrow with the sword already out (II, C4.44). It never once helps him.

His net for quarry in the deep Khanjast.: Khanjast, Pahlavi Chēchast, is usually identified with Lake Urmia, and the great fire of Azargashasp stood in the same province — which is why the two Shahs can ride from the shrine to the lake within a chapter. Gudarz’s guess that the hermit has been fishing and has landed a nahang is wrong only in the species.

C4.43Kavus and Khosrow Come to Hohm

The two Shahs come to Hohm, who proposes a lure: torture Garsivaz until his brother answers. Raw ox-hide is sewn round Garsivaz’s shoulders, and his cries bring Afrasiab wading into the shallows, where the brothers lament their lost greatness to each other across the water.

Sew raw ox-hide across his shoulders tight,: The cruelty is mechanical: untanned hide shrinks hard as it dries, so a rawhide sewn wet around a man tightens on him for hours. Hohm proposes it not as a punishment but as bait, on the calculation that his brother’s screaming is the one sound that will bring Afrasiab out of deep water.

Where are your customs, throne, and royal state?: The second time this lament is heard. A voice in the cave asked Afrasiab where his crown and his warriors had gone (II, C4.41); now Garsivaz, sewn into a hide, puts the same questions to his face. On the form, the roll-call of vanished greatness, see I, B9.39. Ferdowsi hands the fall of his chief villain to the villain’s own family to narrate.

C4.44The Death of Afrasiab and Garsivaz

While the brothers talk, Hohm casts his kamand, drags Afrasiab ashore and hands him to the Shahs. Afrasiab asks to see his daughter; Khosrow answers with the roll of his murders and cuts his throat. Garsivaz is cut in two beside him.

Why slay your mother’s father, old and weak?: Afrasiab has been the poem’s antagonist since the reign of Nohzar, and at the end Ferdowsi gives him a last word that is neither defiance nor repentance but a claim on family feeling: he asks to see his daughter, Khosrow’s mother, before he dies. The poem lets its villain be pitiable without letting him off.

With Indian sword he struck the tyrant’s neck,: Indian steel made the most prized blades of the medieval world, and a sword of Hind is the poem’s standing sign of the best weapon to be had. The manner answers the crime. Khosrow has just charged his grandfather with cutting Siavash’s head off like a sheep’s, and he takes him at the neck himself, on a shore, with a hermit’s cord still on his arms — and the rule he laid down over the dead king of Makran (II, C4.35) goes unmentioned by everyone present.

Thus once a Mobad warned the fierce Bahram:: The narrator breaks off at the climax of his own story to quote a Mobad’s warning to a king named Bahram, apparently one of the Sasanians, who are still many centuries away in the poem’s reckoning. Ferdowsi’s moral asides are spoken from his own present rather than from the story’s past, and he takes no trouble to hide the join.

C4.45Kavus and Khosrow Return to Pars

Khosrow hurries from the lake to the fire of Azargashasp, endows it richly, robes the Mobadan and gives to the poor. Letters go out announcing that the earth is cleansed and Siavash avenged. After forty days of feasting with Kavus the court turns back to Pars.

The earth from Dragon’s evil, root and seed.: The dispatch turns Afrasiab into a dragon, and by doing so turns Khosrow into Fereydoon: the king who masters the dragon is the founding image of legitimate rule in Iran. On Azhi Dahaka and his chaining, see I, A5.9. The sentence is doing constitutional work, not zoology.

Dispatches then were written far and wide,: The circular letter announcing a victory is a real instrument of Persian and later Islamic government: the news reaches every frontier in the king’s own words and with the king’s own framing — here, that the earth has been cleansed and that Siavash is somehow alive again. It goes out before the celebrations do.

C4.46The Death of Kay Kavus

Kavus thanks God for having lived to see the revenge taken, and dies. He is dried, wrapped and seated on an ivory throne in a tower ten kamands high, which is then sealed. Khosrow mourns forty days, takes the crown, and reigns sixty years.

From musk to camphor in the locks I bear.: Musk is black and camphor white, so the pair is the Persian shorthand for a head that has turned. Kavus reckons his age in perfumes, and puts it at three times fifty years: one of the long formal totals the poem assigns the Kayanian kings, figures of authority rather than of arithmetic.

The nobles brought Dabiqi cloth to spread,: Dabiqi is the fine linen of Dabiq in the Egyptian Delta, among the costliest cloth in the medieval Mediterranean, and it lies here with Roman brocade, aloes, musk and camphor. The body is dried, wrapped, seated upright on an ivory throne and sealed into a built tower rather than exposed; on the dakhmeh and the older practice, see I, B12.25.

For king or Zardosht, earth becomes the bed,: Zardosht is named as the type of the holy man several books before he is born into the poem — his story comes with Goshtasb, later in this volume. This is not carelessness. The moralizing asides are spoken in the poet’s own voice and out of his own time, in which king and prophet are the two poles of authority and the brick under the head is what both come to.

C4.47Khosrow Is Overtaken by Melancholy

Khosrow reckons up his reign: no enemy is left anywhere, and he begins to fear that success will corrupt him as it did Jamshid and Kavus and that the farr will leave him. He asks God to take him from the world, closes the court, and prays a week.

God’s farr would part from me and take its flight.: The poem’s whole theory of kingship turned into a private fear. The farr abandons a king who turns to wrong; it left Jamshid, and it left Kavus for a season. Khosrow, who has everything the poem can give a king, can see no way of keeping it except to stop being king. No other Shah in the Shahnameh reasons himself off the throne.

Now I deem better that I should depart,: Kay Khosrow does not die at the end of his story. Zoroastrian tradition counts Kavi Haosravah among the immortals, withdrawn from the world and expected back for its renewal at the end of time, and the strange sequence that begins here — a king at the summit of success asking to be taken away — is the poem’s form of that belief. What is being prepared is a departure, not a death.

C4.48The Court Is Closed to the Nobles

Admitted after a week, the chiefs protest that no king was ever more favored and beg to know what grieves him. Khosrow tells them only that he has asked God for something hidden, orders them to feast, and has the curtain shut again so that he can pray alone.

He bade them draw the door-curtain aside,: Access to a Persian king ran through a curtain and the chamberlain who held it, and the curtain is the whole apparatus of majesty in one object. Drawing it or closing it is therefore a political act: Khosrow’s order to keep it shut against stranger, friend and kin alike is what convinces Iran that something has gone wrong with him.

In throne and crown through this: to kill or die.: The chiefs offer the only help they can conceive — name the enemy, name the fault, name the price — because in their understanding a crown is held by killing and dying. They have no category for a king whose difficulty is that there is nothing left to fight, which is precisely Khosrow’s difficulty.

C4.49Zal and Rostam Are Summoned

The nobles conclude the Shah is keeping company with Divs, as Kavus once did. Gudarz sends Giv to Sistan to fetch Zal and Rostam with the sages and star-readers of Zabul and Kabul. On the eighth day Khosrow opens the court and tells the assembly nothing.

And surely sits with Divs, and holds debate.: The nobles diagnose their king’s piety as possession. Div-counsel is the standard Iranian explanation for a ruler who has turned strange — it is what they believe happened to Kavus — and it is the charge Zal will bring to Khosrow’s face (II, C4.53). The irony running through the whole sequence is that the most devout act in the poem looks from the outside exactly like madness.

And Kabul’s sages skilled to read the sky.: When Iranian counsel fails, Iran sends to India. The astronomers summoned from Kabul, Ghanooj, Danbar, Morgh and Mai reach the court with their tables at II, C4.51; on those tables and the reckoning made from them, see I, A8.17.

C4.50Soroush Appears to Khosrow in Dream

Khosrow prays five weeks more. In a dream Soroush tells him his wish is granted: he is to give his treasure to worthy men, choose a successor who would not harm an ant, and leave the world. He wakes drenched, gives thanks, and sits without crown or armlet.

He dreamed that blessed Soroush, drawing near,: Soroush (see I, A1.1) appears at the hinges of the poem, and nearly always to overrule a king’s own judgment about what he may do: he forbade Fereydoon to kill Zahhak (I, A5.9), and here he gives Kay Khosrow leave to stop being king. Ferdowsi needs the sanction. Without it the abdication is exactly the dereliction Zal is about to call it.

Let him not hurt an ant upon the ground.: The test for a successor is the ant again (see the note at II, C4.32). A line of this shape is quoted as Ferdowsi’s wherever Persian is read, though the celebrated wording — do not harm the ant that drags its grain — is Saadi’s, from the Bustan, and the critical text of the Shahnameh carries a plainer version that later copyists overwrote with his. The sentiment is still as close as the poem comes to a single portable maxim.

C4.51Zal Admonishes Kay Khosrow

Zal and Rostam reach a court in dismay and are told the Shah has strayed. Zal answers that kings tire, then greets Khosrow with high praise, explains the sages and star-readers he has brought from the east, and asks what secret has turned the royal heart away.

Your name is nush-daru no bane can beat.: Zal pays the compliment with the name of the remedy his own son begged from Kavus, and did not get, while Sohrab was dying (see I, B8.22). The praise is conventional; the word, in this mouth, is not. Ferdowsi has him reach for it at the moment he is about to fail to hold on to another king.

From Manuchehr to Kay Qobad’s crown,: The list is Zal’s credential. He has served from Manuchehr through Nohzar, Zav and Qobad to Kavus and now to this Shah, and he counts Siavash a son of his own besides. He is the poem’s continuous memory, the one man who can tell a king that no king has ever done this — and in the next chapters he is wrong.

C4.52Kay Khosrow Answers Zal

Khosrow praises Zal and Rostam at length, then explains himself: he has prayed to be taken from the world before power corrupts him, and Soroush has granted it. He casts off realm, crown and belt. Zal, angered, tells the chiefs no Kayanian king ever spoke so.

Hushang and Fereydoon, upright and great,: Zal’s objection is religious before it is political. In the Zoroastrian understanding the good man’s work is done in the world, and a king rules because the world must be governed against evil; renunciation has no standing as a virtue in that system. Since Hushang and Fereydoon never put the crown down, Zal can account for Khosrow’s wish only by supposing a Div has whispered it to him.

Realm, crown, throne, belt: all these aside I cast.: The belt belongs in the list because it is the sign of service: Zal dates his own loyalty from the day he bound his belt to serve the throne, and Khosrow unbinds his in the same breath as the crown. Two men measure their lives by the same object in one chapter, the one putting it on for good and the other taking it off.

C4.53Zal Reproaches Khosrow

Zal reproaches the Shah openly: he was bred in Turan, and one grandfather was a sorcerer and the other a fool who ignored the same advice and fell out of the sky. To leave the throne now is Div-counsel, and the farr will be stripped from him. The chiefs agree.

In Turan you were born, and there you dwelt;: Zal argues from blood — Turanian birth, Turanian water, a sorcerer for one grandfather and a schemer for the other — and so revives the objection Tus once raised against Khosrow’s accession. It is the ugliest speech any sympathetic character makes in this book, and the poem answers it in the next chapter out of Khosrow’s own mouth.

Though I advised him often, frank and clear,: Zal’s authority rests on a record of having been ignored: he warned Kavus against the flight beyond the clouds and was not heeded. Counselors in the Shahnameh are usually right and usually disregarded, and Zal offers the pattern as proof that he should be heard now — in the one case where the king has thought the matter through better than he has.

C4.54Khosrow’s Answer and Zal’s Apology

Khosrow answers with deliberate mildness for Rostam’s sake: he is proud of both descents, blames no king for high aims, has avenged his father, and fears only becoming a Jamshid or a Zahhak. Zal, abashed, apologizes; the Shah takes his hand and seats him at his side.

I feel no shame that such descent is mine.: Khosrow’s answer dissolves the distinction Zal has just built. He is Kavus’s grandson and Afrasiab’s, which means he descends twice from Fereydoon, once through Iraj and once through Tur: the two houses the war divided are a single house. This is the poem’s own view, and the reason the Turanian war reads from end to end as a family crime.

My bright heart saw that other world revealed;: Against the charge of Div-counsel Khosrow sets a claim to knowledge: he has been shown the other world (on mēnōg and gētīg, see I, B9.5). It is also the difference between him and the grandfather Zal has just thrown at him. Kavus tried to reach the sky with a throne and eagles; Khosrow says he has already been given the sight of it.

Now Kay Khosrow has come to teach us all;: The retraction is remarkable in a poem that rarely lets its elders be wrong. Zal does not merely apologize: he concedes that there exists a kind of kingship he has never met in a long life of serving kings. What is left of his objection is personal — he does not want to lose this one.

C4.55Kay Khosrow Gives His Last Counsel

Khosrow has the army drawn up on the plain in full order of battle, then tells it from the throne that he is leaving the world, and gives away treasury, provinces and arms. Someone in the crowd says the Shah is mad. A week of feasting follows.

Arrange a field of battle on the plain.: Khosrow stages his abdication as a review in full order of battle: tents ranked by color, the Kaviani banner in the center, Rostam on the left with the men of Kabul, Tus and Gudarz in front, Bijan and Gostaham in the rear, the ox-head gorz across his knees. He announces that he is leaving the world in the one form his warriors entirely understand.

The Shah is mad; his wits have flown;: Ferdowsi keeps a dissenting voice within earshot. The speaker is nobody in particular, one man in a crowd, and he is not answered, corrected or punished; the chapter closes on a week of revels with the remark still standing. The poem admires what Khosrow is doing and declines to pretend that it looked holy at the time.

C4.56Gudarz Receives Khosrow’s Mandate

On the eighth day Khosrow makes Gudarz steward of the realm, charging him with inns, bridges, reservoirs, dry wells, ruined fire temples, orphans and widows. He divides his arms, herds, palaces and jewels among Rostam, Tus, Giv, Fariborz and Bijan. The chiefs ask who will have the crown.

And bridges near Iran that need your hand.: The mandate reads like a page from a mirror for princes, and every item on it is a standing measure of good government in Iran: rest-houses along the roads, bridges, the reservoirs and the wells that have gone dry, fire temples left without a herbad to serve them, orphans, widows, the used-up old. A reign is judged by its waterworks, and Khosrow’s last official act is maintenance.

The Badavard is filled with treasure deep:: Bādāvard means ‘brought by the wind’, and it is the name of one of the celebrated royal hoards of Persian tradition, as Ganj-e Arūs, ‘the bride’s treasure’, appears to be another — the Gang-e-Aroos which Khosrow names a few lines later. Those great named treasuries belong to the last Sasanian kings, and Ferdowsi lends them here to a Kayanian who is giving everything away.

As your remembrance this resplendent crown?: The question the chiefs ask is the one the rest of the volume turns on, and Khosrow’s answer will pass over Fariborz, Kavus’s own son, and over the house of Rostam, in favor of a kinsman whose fitness Zal will dispute at once. The next book is his: see II, C5.1.

C4.57Zal Petitions Khosrow for Rostam

Zal recites Rostam’s services — Mazandaran, Hamavaran, Sohrab, Kamus — and asks what reward the departing Shah will leave him. Kay Khosrow grants a sealed patent making Rostam lord of Nimruz, from Zabulistan to Sind, and gives robes and gold to Zal’s companions.

He heard, and set out swiftly on his own;: Zal’s petition is a table of contents for Volume I: the Seven Stages and the rescue from Mazandaran (I, B5.1), the chains of Hamavaran, the killing of Sohrab (I, B8), the long war with Kamus (I, B14.28). Ferdowsi settles accounts with his greatest hero by having the hero’s father read the record aloud.

From Zabulistan to the river Sind,: The patent sets out the hereditary march of the house of Sam — Zabulistan, Kabul, Bost, Ghaznin, all of Nimruz (see I, A7.5) — and it is a legal document, written, witnessed and sealed in gold. Lohrasp confirms the grant at II, C4.64, and it is the title Rostam’s house will still be defending when Bahman comes to avenge Esfandiyar (II, D1).

C4.58Giv Receives Khosrow’s Patent

Gudarz reminds the Shah of his family’s losses and of Giv’s seven hungry years searching Turan. Kay Khosrow grants the house of Gudarz Qom and Isfahan, seals the patent, and charges the assembled chiefs to honor Giv and obey Gudarz.

My sons and grandsons numbered seventy-eight;: The poem keeps accounts. Gudarz counts seventy-eight sons and grandsons and eight survivors, most of the rest lost in the Battle of the Twelve Rukhs (II, C3). Within six chapters the snow takes the last of them, and at II, C4.64 he stands before a new king with nothing to say but their names.

He is my living memory; hold him dear,: Giv found Kay Khosrow in Turan and brought him home, so the king owes him the throne itself, and ‘my living memory’ is exact rather than gracious. The charge is also the poem’s cruelest piece of timing: Giv is dead in the snow within five chapters (II, C4.63), and the chiefs are left keeping a trust with nobody to keep it for.

C4.59Tus Receives Khosrow’s Patent

Tus rises in his turn and recites his own service — Hamavan, the night watches kept for Siavash, the chains of Hamavaran — then asks what is left for him. The Shah answers that fate has punished him enough, confirms him in Kaveh’s banner, and gives him Khorasan.

You know my faults, and where my virtues shine.: Tus is the only one of the three petitioners who pleads faults as well as services, and he has them: he disobeyed his orders, caused Forood’s death, and was cursed and imprisoned for it (I, B12.20). The Shah answers with a grant instead of a reckoning, and ‘You bore more grief from fate’ comes close to absolution.

Keep Kaveh’s standard still in your command; / In golden shoes, lead warriors of the land.: The banner and the golden boots belong together as the insignia of the commander of Iran’s armies, and Tus holds both by descent from Nohzar; on the banner itself, see I, A5.5. The same regalia — throne, led horse, golden boots, crown, banner — will be sent into Rum in a baggage train at II, C5.17.

C4.60Kay Khosrow Names Lohrasp Shah

Khosrow calls Lohrasp in, sets his own crown on him and names him Shah. The chiefs are appalled, and Zal denies that Lohrasp has the birth for it. The Shah defends his choice; Zal blackens his lips with dust and submits; Khosrow takes his leave weeping.

Among the chiefs, Lohrasp’s name still remained / Unread upon the list the Shah maintained.: The chiefs have never heard of Lohrasp; the tradition has known him for a thousand years. He is Avestan Aurvaṭ-aspa, ‘of swift horses’, and the Avesta names Vishtaspa — Ferdowsi’s Goshtasb, who will shelter Zardosht — as his son. The name left unread on the king’s list is the one the whole future of the faith hangs on.

With that black dust he stained his lips: A man who has sworn wrongly unswears by shaming the mouth that spoke. Zal presses his fingers into the ground and blackens his own lips with the dust, then says plainly that nobody should hold it against him. A blackened face is still the Persian image for disgrace, and Zal chooses the literal disgrace over letting his oath stand against the king’s last command.

We will not arm for him, nor with him ride.: The Iranian nobles come nearer to open mutiny here than almost anywhere in the poem, and the issue is birth (nezhād, see I, B11.1) against fitness. Khosrow answers with the doctrine Ferdowsi states outright at I, A5.9: the crown belongs to the man whose conduct and fortune fit him for it, not to the man whose blood does.

C4.61Khosrow Takes Leave of His Women

Khosrow summons his four wives and tells them he is leaving the world. They faint, tear their faces and beg to be taken along; he answers with a catalogue of dead queens and a charge to live righteously, then hands them into Lohrasp’s keeping.

Where are the sisters of Jamshid this hour?: On this ubi sunt strain, see I, B9.39. What is new is that every example here is a woman, and one of them is the speaker’s own mother: the daughter of Afrasiab who crossed the water. Khosrow consoles his widows by reminding them that queens die too, and that nobody knows where any of them went.

When you meet me and Siavash again.: Khosrow binds his heir by the next world and by his murdered father: Lohrasp must one day be able to face Siavash without shame. The vengeance for Siavash’s blood (see I, B9.55) has driven two volumes and is now finished, and the last arrangement the king makes before walking out of the world is for his father’s good opinion of the man who follows him.

C4.62Kay Khosrow Vanishes in the Snow

The army escorts Khosrow to a mountain, where a hundred thousand Iranians beg him to stay. He sends most of them home, keeps five chiefs, rides on to a spring, bathes and prays, and tells them that at sunrise he will be gone and snow will close the road.

Hereafter I shall vanish from your sight.: Kay Khosrow does not die. Zoroastrian tradition counts him among the immortals, who withdraw from the world rather than end in it, and the Pahlavi books make him the companion of the savior Soshyans at the renewal of the faith. The hidden fortress of Kangdez, which he reached on campaign (see I, B9.39), is not where he waits: that is Bishutan’s station (II, C6.2). Ferdowsi keeps the doctrine and drops the explanation — his king simply walks out of the story.

To Fereydoon Soroush did not appear.: The crowd argues from precedent, and the precedent is sound: no earlier king, not even Fereydoon, was called out of the world by Soroush. So they conclude that grief has unsettled the Shah’s judgment, and propose to pray him back in the fire-temple. Ferdowsi lets the objection stand. Nobody in the poem answers it.

He bathed his head and body in the flow, / And read the Zand-Avesta, soft and low.: No priest has come with him, so the king performs his own last rites: the ablution that Zoroastrian practice requires before prayer, then the recitation. On the Zand-Avesta, see II, C4.3. The detail is domestic rather than grand — a man washing in a spring at night and reading half aloud — and it is the last thing he is seen doing.

All but the tall in stature, rich in farr.: On the farr, see I, A4.1. The warning is exact, and it is also a test: the road can be crossed only by those who carry the farr. Ferdowsi counts out the eight who rode with the king — Zal, Rostam, Gudarz, Giv, Bijan, Gostaham, Fariborz, Tus, the last of the heroic generation. The three oldest take the hint and turn back. The rest do not.

C4.63The Pahlevans Are Lost in the Snow

At sunrise the Shah is gone. The five chiefs search, give up, camp by the spring and talk of the wonder; then the storm comes and buries them. Zal, Rostam and Gudarz wait a week on the mountain, then send searchers, who bring the bodies back for burial.

A mortal king has walked alive to God.: Ferdowsi puts the reader’s doubt into the mouths of his own witnesses: they ask what tale men could be expected to believe, and answer that the wise smile at roads nobody has traveled. It is the defense he makes for the poem’s marvels in the prologue, where the old stories are to be read as ramz, sign or symbol (see I, A0.8).

The helpless heroes perished in the snow:: In a poem where every great man’s death is a set-piece, four of the greatest get two lines each and not a blow is struck. Ferdowsi retires the heroic age by weather. The stage has to be cleared for Lohrasp and Goshtasb, and there is no enemy left alive who could have cleared it in battle.

What grief from Kavus’s house has come to me?: Gudarz told the king at II, C4.58 that eight of his seventy-eight were left. Here the last of them are gone, and he names the cause: the house of Kavus, whose quarrels consumed his family, since the vengeance for Siavash took the others. It is the nearest the poem comes to letting a loyal servant send in the bill.

C4.64Lohrasp Learns Kay Khosrow Has Vanished

Lohrasp takes the throne, tells the chiefs that rejecting him means rejecting Khosrow’s last command, and invites objections. Zal and Gudarz swear loyalty, Gudarz tearing his robes for his dead sons. Lohrasp is crowned at Mehrgan, and the poet closes the tale of Kay Khosrow.

At Mehrgan wore the crown, he did the same.: On Mehrgan, see I, A6.1. The passage is precise about why the day matters: it falls after the autumn equinox, once the balance of day and night has been passed, and it is the day named Mehr within the month named Mehr. The great feasts fall where a day-name and a month-name coincide, and a king crowned on one is borrowing Fereydoon’s day.

His robes of Chin and Rum’s rich-woven array.: Tearing the clothes is what mourners did; what makes the gesture bite is what these clothes are. Chinese and Roman silk was the plunder and tribute of the war that emptied Gudarz’s house, and he is wearing the profits of his sons’ deaths at the moment he learns the last of them are gone.

The heart is locked, and wine provides the key.: The book turns on a drinking song. These wine-and-mortality passages are where Ferdowsi speaks most nearly in his own voice, and he uses one here as a hinge: the Kayanian heroes are buried, Lohrasp’s reign has not begun, and the poet calls for old wine and an old dehqan’s story (see I, A6.23) before starting again.