Notes · Book C9Rostam and Shaghad

C9.1The Prelude

Ferdowsi closes the tale of Esfandiyar and turns to Rostam’s death, naming as his source Azad Sarv of Marv, a descendant of Sahm who held an old book of kings. He praises Mahmud, laments his age and poverty, and calls the poem his monument.

Who lived with Ahmad, son of Sahl, in Marv: Ferdowsi almost never names a living informant, and here he gives two men and a city: the aged Azad Sarv, who claimed descent from Sahm and kept an old book of kings, and his patron, usually identified with the Samanid commander Ahmad son of Sahl. The Sistani material, of which Rostam’s death is the end, is generally thought to have reached the poem by some such route.

In Mahmud Abul-Qasim’s name I write: Abul-Qasim was Mahmud of Ghazna’s kunya, and Ferdowsi uses the full style at the head of the saddest book in the poem. The praise of a living patron and the complaint of failing ears, failing feet and an empty purse stand a few lines apart in the same passage.

C9.2Rostam Comes to Kabul for His Brother

A singing girl in Zal’s household bears Shaghad, whose horoscope foretells the ruin of Sahm’s line. Reared in Kabul and married to its king’s daughter, he resents the tribute Rostam still claims, and with the king he plots a feigned quarrel and a field of hidden pits.

In Indian tables used to read the skies: The astrologers are called from Kashmir and Kabul and work from Indian tables (on the zij and the Sindhind, see I, A8.17): the doom is cast in the Indian manner, on the Indian edge of the Iranian world, for a child who will be brought up there. Zal hears the whole prediction, prays, names the boy, and then sends him to exactly the place the stars warned of.

Was one ox-hide, which Rostam used to claim: The tribute is a single ox-hide a year, and its smallness is the point: a token whose only function is to state once a year who is lord and who is vassal. That is why it cannot be waived, and why Shaghad can build a murder upon it.

C9.3The Treachery of the Hunting-Ground

The pits are dug and planted with blades. The king of Kabul meets Rostam barefoot and is forgiven, then tempts him toward a hunting ground. Rakhsh smells the earth and balks; Rostam whips him forward, and both fall among the spears.

They honeycombed the hunting ground below: Rostam is not killed in war. He dies in a hunting park of the kind kings laid out for pleasure (on the pairidaēza, see I, B7.1), in pits dug by hired men and planted with sword-blades and spear-points set haft downward. The greatest fighter in the poem is disposed of by carpentry and secrecy, which is Ferdowsi’s judgment on the age that is beginning.

Rakhsh smelled the earth and drew his body small: Rakhsh knows. The horse who once killed a lion over his sleeping master (I, B5.1) smells the trap, gathers himself small, tears at the ground and refuses to go on, and Rostam takes the whip to him. It is the cruelest moment in the story, and Ferdowsi offers no comment beyond the remark that his rider’s eyes were veiled.

The heart turns toward the thing that brings its end: The narrator steps forward for two lines to say that a man’s wishes carry him where he must die, and that the world keeps its arrangements hidden. Ferdowsi often marks the turn of a fate with an aside of this kind. This is the last one Rostam is given.

C9.4The Death of Rostam

Rostam drags himself out of the pit, names Shaghad’s treachery, and recalls how Jamshid and Siavash died. He asks for his bow against lions; Shaghad hides behind a hollow plane tree, and one shaft pins him to it. Rostam dies giving thanks.

The shaft sewed tree and brother into one: Sewing runs through the whole tragedy: Esfandiyar’s arrows stitched Rostam’s armor to his flesh, and Rostam’s last shot sews Shaghad to the tree he is hiding behind. The plane, chenār, is the long-lived shade tree of Iranian gardens, and this one is hollow, which is why an arrow can pass through it. Rostam’s last act is a piece of marksmanship.

Yet Bivar’s saw divided him in two: Dying, Rostam consoles himself with a roll of the great who died worse: Jamshid sawn apart by Zahhak, named here by the epithet of the ten thousand horses (on bēwar, see I, A4.2), and Siavash with Gurvi’s khanjar at his throat. The catalogue of vanished kings (I, B9.39) has turned into a deathbed argument.

C9.5Zal Hears of Rostam’s Death

One rider carries the news to Zabul, where Zal mourns Rostam, Zavareh and Rakhsh. Faramarz finds Kabul deserted, has the bodies washed, perfumed and coffined, and brings them home, where Rostam is laid on golden thrones in a garden tomb.

They made a splendid coffin out of teak: The warm water, the camphor, ambergris and saffron, the sewn wounds, the brocade, the teak coffin with its seams sealed in pitch and the tomb roofed over a garden are the rites Ferdowsi gives his kings and heroes (on the astōdān, see I, B1.9). The pitch matters: a sealed coffin keeps the dead from touching the earth they would defile.

Then from the pit they drew brave Rakhsh that day: Rakhsh is drawn out, washed, clothed and carried home on an elephant, and it takes carpenters and heavy boards to move him. No other horse in the poem is buried. Ferdowsi treats him as the third of the dead, beside Rostam and Zavareh, and gives him a funeral of his own.

C9.6Faramarz Avenges Rostam

Faramarz arms his father’s treasury and marches on Kabul. He takes the king captive, flays a strip from his back and hangs him head down in the pit, burns forty of his kin and then Shaghad with the plane tree, and installs a new ruler.

He hung him headfirst in the pit of dread: The vengeance is measure for measure: the king of Kabul is brought back to the hunting ground, flayed, and hung head down in the pit he dug. The poem’s usual pity for a beaten enemy is entirely absent here, and Ferdowsi lets the punishment run to its end without a word of approval or of blame.

He burned the forty kinsmen, one and all: Burning is the worst thing Faramarz can do. In Zoroastrian law a corpse laid on fire defiles the holiest of the creations, so the pyre is not only an execution but a sacrilege, and the same fire takes Shaghad and the plane tree with him. It is the last deed of Rostam’s line in the poem.

C9.7Rudabeh’s Grief for Rostam

After a year of mourning Rudabeh vows to fast until she sees Rostam’s soul. Her wits fail, and she is found in the kitchen at night about to eat a dead snake. Fed and rested, she grants Zal’s grim wisdom and gives her wealth to the poor.

That hunger’s pain will far surpass this woe: Zal’s answer to his wife’s grief is the bleakest consolation in the Shahnameh, and the chapter is built to prove him right. Rudabeh fasts, loses her reason, is caught with a dead snake in her hands, and after food and sleep tells him his counsel was wise. The poem’s greatest love story ends in a lesson about the body.

Where water held a dead snake in her sight: Nothing else in the poem is quite like this scene. Rudabeh and Zal, whose courtship fills a book of Volume I (I, A8.3 and following), are last seen in a kitchen at night, and the snake in the water is how Ferdowsi chooses to take his leave of them: not with a lament but with an old woman out of her senses and a servant prising open her hands.

C9.8Bahman Receives the Kingdom

Goshtasb, still mourning, leaves the crown to Bahman with Jamasp and Bishutan to guide him, counsels justice, and dies after a hundred and twenty years. Ferdowsi reflects that death levels the king and the poor man, and turns to Bahman’s reign.

For six score years I ruled without a peer: The hundred and twenty years are the poem’s own figure. The distance between this king and his Avestan namesake is the widest in the Shahnameh: Vishtaspa, who received Zardosht’s revelation and is named in the gāthās themselves, here dies as a man who spent his son to keep a crown and was told so to his face by his own household. Ferdowsi received him as history and did not soften him.

Past sweets and nush-daru came poison’s pain: The nush-daru, the drug of life that came too late for Sohrab (I, B8.22), returns as a figure of speech at the close of a long reign: whatever the sweetness, the last taste is poison. Ferdowsi ends the Kayanian age with the same word he used at its most famous death.