New NaqqaliNotes · Book C7Esfandiyar’s Seven Stages and the Ruyin Dezh
C7.1Praise for Mahmud the Great King
Read the verse →Ferdowsi opens the Seven Stages with praise of Mahmud, a spring of thunder, tulips and narcissus, and the claim that the Shah’s open hand outdoes the rain. He then calls for the elder’s tale of the Ruyin Dezh.
Earth only laughs when rain falls from on high: The spring prelude and the turn that follows it belong to the court qasida: the poet paints the new season, then makes it a compliment, the cloud weeping while the patron laughs and gives. That the Seven Stages open with a dedication of their own suggests Ferdowsi could present a long episode as a finished piece, complete with its own exordium.
When in the Ram the sun renewed the crown: The sun entering Aries is the vernal equinox and the start of the Persian year (on Nowruz, see I, A4.1). Ferdowsi dates his praise to the season of gifts, and the Ram comes back over the stages themselves, where dawn in Aries sends the hero out.
C7.2The Wolves of the First Stage
Read the verse →The dehqan begins the tale. Esfandiyar leaves Balkh with Gorgsar as guide, questions him over wine about the roads to the Ruyin Dezh, chooses the shortest, then rides ahead alone and kills the two giant wolves of the first stage.
Two wolves will meet you where the Stages span: Esfandiyar’s Seven Stages (haft khān) are built on Rostam’s, told in Volume I (I, B5.1): the short and deadly road chosen over the safe one, the army left behind, a captive guide taken from the enemy (Ulad for Rostam, I, B5.8; Gorgsar here), beasts and a sorceress on the way, and prisoners of the Shah’s own blood to be freed at the end. The comparison is the point. Ferdowsi is setting the hero of the old warrior world beside the champion of the new faith, and the two will meet in the next book.
His name was Bishutan, a chief of fame: Bishutan, Esfandiyar’s brother, is the steady second left in charge of the army at every stage. In Zoroastrian tradition his name, Pahlavi Pēšyōtan, belongs to one of the immortals: a son of Goshtasb who does not die but waits to serve at the world’s renewal. Ferdowsi keeps him wholly human — the brother who prays, restrains and grieves.
C7.3The Lions of the Second Stage
Read the verse →Plied with wine, Gorgsar warns of a lion no nahang could face. Esfandiyar laughs, marches through the night, and at dawn kills both the lion and the lioness with his sword, washing and praying before his troops come up.
A lion and a lioness were near: The stages come in couples: two wolves, male and female; a lion and his mate; later the Simorgh with her young. Ferdowsi escalates by doubling, and gives even the monsters households, which is part of why the bird’s death in the fifth stage is harder to watch than the rest.
He washed his head and body clean of gore: Every stage ends the same way, with the prince cleaning the blood off before he prays, and once seeking ground no blood has touched. It is not fastidiousness: in Zoroastrian law contact with dead matter defiles, and the champion of the new faith will not come before God carrying it.
C7.4The Dragon of the Third Stage
Read the verse →Warned of a dragon whose breath draws fish from the sea, Esfandiyar has a wheeled box built and hung about with swords. The dragon swallows cart and horses, is pinned on the blades, and he hacks it dead, fainting in its venomous fumes.
He had a sturdy wooden carriage made: The bladed box belongs to folktale rather than epic: the monster is killed by what it swallows, and the hero wins by carpentry, hiring carpenters and testing the machine before he uses it. It made a good picture, and the cart wedged in the dragon’s mouth is among the scenes Shahnameh painters returned to.
The venom’s fumes subdued me in the fight: The only thing that brings Esfandiyar down in seven stages is not a blow. The dragon’s fumes lay him out as though dead, and his brother revives him with rosewater. For a hero whose body cannot be pierced (C8.7), Ferdowsi finds the way in through the air he breathes.
C7.5The Witch of the Fourth Stage
Read the verse →Warned of a witch, Esfandiyar rides ahead with wine and a tanbur and sings of his loneliness. The witch comes to him as a Turkish beauty; he throws Zardosht’s chain around her neck, forces her true shape into view, and kills her.
From Paradise Zardosht had brought this charm: The chain is the new religion’s weapon: brought from Paradise by Zardosht, given to Goshtasb, bound on the prince’s arm, and it is what holds the shape-shifter when a sword could not. Sorcery in the Zoroastrian view is Ahriman’s craft, so the answer to it comes from the faith rather than from the hero’s strength.
Men call her Ghul; beware that fatal snare: The ghūl of Arabian desert lore is a shape-shifter who waylays the traveler alone on the road; the word reached English as ghoul. Ferdowsi’s witch works by the same method, taking the shape the traveler most wants to see — and Esfandiyar, who has just sung for a moon-faced companion to share his wine, has told her exactly what to be.
C7.6The Simorgh of the Fifth Stage
Read the verse →Gorgsar describes a Simorgh that carries off elephants. Esfandiyar drives the bladed cart to its mountain; the bird tears its wings on the swords, and he cuts it apart while its young shriek above a plain hidden by the carcass.
The travelers call it Simorgh; you will find: This is not the bird of Zal and Rostam (I, A7.2) but a predator with a nest and young, and the author’s glossary for this volume keeps the two apart. The collision is still hard to miss: the champion of the new faith hacks a Simorgh to pieces, while the Simorgh of the older stories reared Zal and is not finished with his house.
It bears off elephants in single flight: A bird strong enough to carry an elephant is a fixture of eastern travel lore; the Arabian tales know it as the roc (rukhkh), which lifts elephants to feed its young. Gorgsar frames it as hearsay in exactly that way — what the travelers call it — and Esfandiyar answers by promising to stitch its shoulders with arrows.
C7.7The Snow of the Sixth Stage
Read the verse →Gorgsar foretells a blizzard and then a waterless desert. The Iranians beg the prince to turn back and he rebukes them; snow buries the camp for three days until Bishutan’s prayer clears the sky, and the army marches on stripped of baggage.
No gorz or bow or sword will help you fight: The sixth stage has no monster in it. Weather cannot be fought, and this one is won by Bishutan’s prayer and by a commander who has just quarreled with his own troops over whether to go on at all. It is the single stage where Esfandiyar asks another man to save the army for him.
Like powdered tutiya, its sands will run: Tutiya is tutty, the fine zinc-bearing powder gathered from furnace flues and long used as an eye-salve; Persian verse uses it both for the finest dust and for what clears the sight. Gorgsar means sand so fine that it pours and will not bear a hoof.
C7.8The River of the Seventh Stage
Read the verse →The army fords a river Gorgsar swore was desert. When the captive curses him, Esfandiyar splits his head and throws him to the fish. From a height he sees the Ruyin Dezh, despairs, and kills two Turks after they describe its garrison.
And fish consumed the traitor where he died: Gorgsar has lied at every stage and is killed at the last one, within sight of the fortress only he could find. Compare Ulad, the guide Rostam took by force on his own stages and kept alive and paid (I, B5.8). How the two heroes use, and end with, their guides is one of the sharpest differences between the journeys.
He climbed a height; Ruyin Dezh lay below: The name is usually read as rūyīn dezh, ‘the fortress of brass’, the same word that gives Esfandiyar his epithet rūyīn-tan, ‘brazen-bodied’ (C8.7). A brazen man is sent against a brazen wall, and the answer to both turns out not to be strength: he takes the place by disguise, as he is himself undone by something other than force.
C7.9Esfandiyar’s Guile at the Ruyin Dezh
Read the verse →Esfandiyar enters the Ruyin Dezh as a merchant named Kharrad, with a hundred and sixty men sealed in chests among his camels. Arjasp grants him a house and a shop, laughs off rumors that the prince is crossing the Seven Stages, and bids him trade freely.
He hid them in the chests with careful art: Armed men carried inside a fortress in its own cargo is among the oldest tricks in story — the horse at Troy, the jars of the Forty Thieves — and Ferdowsi gives it a full merchant’s apparatus: a hundred red camels, gold, brocade, gems, a throne and crown, and wares sold below their worth to bring the whole town to the shop.
Upon our shoulders death has laid its weight: Asked what the sealed chests hold, the carrier answers with the literal truth and is heard as a porter complaining of his trade. Ferdowsi enjoys a reply that only the reader can understand, and this one is grim twice over, since the men in the chests may not see the morning either.
C7.10The Sisters Recognize Esfandiyar
Read the verse →At dusk the captive princesses come to the merchant’s gate with water jars. Esfandiyar shouts abuse to hide himself, but Homahyi knows his voice; he uncovers his face, swears them to silence, then wins Arjasp’s leave to feast the Turkish chiefs on the rampart.
Homahyi knew his voice; the sound brought peace: Homahyi and Bih Afrid are the sisters the war is fought to recover. Homahyi will hold the throne of Iran in her own right later in this volume (II, D2.1–D2.7), and Ferdowsi lets her show her quality here: she knows her brother by his voice, understands the disguise at once, and keeps it.
The daughters carry water, the son weeps: Esfandiyar’s epigram about his father is the seed of the next book’s quarrel: the daughters are slaves, the son is at war, the king sleeps untroubled. The grievance is fully formed before the promise about the crown is broken, which is why the demand in C8.1 comes out so fast.
C7.11Bishutan Attacks the Ruyin Dezh
Read the verse →Esfandiyar’s bonfire on the rampart signals Bishutan, who brings up the army carrying his brother’s gorz and banner and passing for the prince. Bahman kills Turk-Khan, Kuhram is driven back to the walls, and Arjasp sends out the Turks to fight.
The watchman from the lookout saw the blaze: Fire by night, smoke by day: the signal Esfandiyar arranged in C7.9 is the oldest long-distance telegraph there is, and the plan turns the fortress’s own roof into the beacon, wood stacked for a feast and lit for a battle. The other half of the ruse is the double, Bishutan bearing the ox-head gorz and the banner so the garrison looks for the prince outside while he is within.
Turk-Khan went out, an interpreter near: A quiet piece of realism: the Turkish commander rides out to look over the enemy with an interpreter at his elbow, because the two armies do not share a language. Ferdowsi seldom stops for such things, and he does it here at the one moment when everything depends on a mistaken identification.
C7.12Esfandiyar Slays Arjasp
Read the verse →At night Esfandiyar opens the chests, sends his sisters to safety, storms the palace and kills Arjasp hand to hand. He seals the treasure, rides out with his hundred and sixty men, and leaves orders to cast Arjasp’s head from the wall.
This merchant brings the wares long due: The disguise pays for itself in a line: the merchant announces his goods and the goods are a sword. Ferdowsi gives Esfandiyar the joke before the kill, and then makes the blade carry a maker’s mark — Lohrasp’s and Goshtasb’s — so that the stroke is delivered in the murdered grandfather’s name.
Such is the turning of the worldly wheel: The narrator breaks in at the very top of the triumph to say it cannot last, and he is more exact than he seems: this victory is what destroys Esfandiyar, since the crown he has now earned is the crown he will demand in the chapters that follow. Ferdowsi’s asides tend to fall where the story is about to turn.
C7.13Esfandiyar Slays Kuhram
Read the verse →The watchman proclaims Arjasp dead and his head is thrown from the rampart; the Turks break. Esfandiyar runs Kuhram down, tears him from the saddle, hangs him and Andariman head-down at the gate, and burns the cities of Turan.
The bloodthirsty chieftain abused his power: A rare open judgment on a hero from the narrator, and the poem promptly repeats it from another mouth: Goshtasb’s letter in the next chapter tells his son that the vengeance has passed all bounds and orders him to let mercy into his heart. The champion of the faith is also the most thorough killer in the poem.
Arjasp’s cut head, blood-darkened by the blow: The head is used as a weapon, and timed. First the watchman cries the news through the night, so that Kuhram is unnerved before he knows why; then, when his men are already streaming back to the gate, the head comes over the wall in front of them and the army stops fighting to mourn.
C7.14Esfandiyar’s Letter to Goshtasb
Read the verse →Esfandiyar has a dispatch written to his father reporting the stratagem, Arjasp’s death and the slaughter. Goshtasb answers with praise, an image of Fereydoon’s tree, warnings to guard his life and show mercy, and an order to bring his chiefs to court.
A pen and silk, both Turkish and Chinese: The Shahnameh’s kings write on silk. Ferdowsi’s own century wrote on paper, made in Khorasan and Transoxiana long before his time, so the silk reads as an archaism, or at the least as costly stuff: either way it does for a royal letter what the ox-head gorz does for a weapon, and marks it as belonging to the older world.
Let mercy keep your heart from growing cold: The reply works through the dispatch point by point — first, next, third — as a chancery secretary would work through a document, and turns each item into a lesson: a king’s life is not to be risked, blood is not a way to live, vengeance for thirty-eight brothers has gone past its bounds. It is the one rebuke Esfandiyar does not argue with.
C7.15Esfandiyar Returns to Goshtasb
Read the verse →Esfandiyar loads the plunder, burns the Ruyin Dezh and levels its walls, sends his sons ahead with the treasure, recrosses the stages and is feasted in Iran. Ferdowsi closes with spring, a nightingale, and mourning for Esfandiyar.
For dead Esfandiyar it mourns in pain: The tale of the Seven Stages ends in triumph and then, in its closing lines, becomes a lament: the nightingale mourns Esfandiyar, and the thunder speaks with Rostam’s voice. Ferdowsi finishes the prince’s greatest victory by naming the two men who are about to destroy each other in the next book.
At dawn, hear Pahlavi beneath the rose: The nightingale’s song is called Pahlavi, the old Iranian tongue, a conceit Persian poets kept for centuries; Hafez has the bird singing in Pahlavi from the cypress bough. Here its subject is supplied: it mourns a dead prince, in the language of the age that is ending with him.