Notes · Book B12Forood and the Snowstorm Campaign

B12.1The Prelude

The poet warns that no king should give command to a man eaten by envy and pride. Noble birth without wisdom breeds evil, as the tale that follows will show.

Let no great king, however fierce afield, / Entrust his army to a foe to wield: The prelude points straight at Tus, whom Kay Khosrow is about to appoint although Tus had backed Fariborz for the throne (see B12.5). Ferdowsi often opens a story by announcing its moral, so that the reader watches the disaster coming. The ‘foe’ here is not a traitor but a proud man who cannot bear to serve.

B12.2Tus Goes to Turkistan

Kay Khosrow gives Tus the Kaviani banner and command of the army. He warns him to spare civilians and to avoid the road by Kalat, where his half-brother Forood lives. At the fork Tus overrides Gudarz and takes the green road through Kalat.

Great Tus with golden shoes and Kaveh’s sign: Golden shoes mark royal blood in the Shahnameh, worn by princes of the Pishdadian and Kayanian houses. Tus, grandson of Manuchehr, has the right to them, and Kay Khosrow later speaks of the ‘forty golden-shod men’ in the army (B12.20). On the Kaviani banner, see A5.5.

Spare farmer, artisan, and peaceful hand: Kay Khosrow’s orders amount to a code of war protecting non-combatants. Ferdowsi’s good kings give such instructions again and again, and his armies ignore them again and again, as Tus’s does (B12.14) and as Piran complains (B12.21).

Above all else, keep far from Kalat’s way: Kalat is usually identified with Kalat-e Naderi, a natural fortress on a walled plateau in the mountains of northern Khorasan, not far from Ferdowsi’s own Tus. It later became Nader Shah’s treasure-stronghold. The warning is the hinge of the book: everything that follows comes from Tus’s disobedience.

B12.3News of Tus Reaches Forood

Forood, son of Siavash and Piran’s daughter Jarireh, hears that an Iranian army is coming and drives his herds into the mountain. Jarireh urges him to join Kay Khosrow in avenging Siavash, and to seek out Bahram and Zangeh, his father’s old companions.

Great Piran gave me first to Siavash: Jarireh was Siavash’s first wife, given to him by Piran before his marriage to Afrasiab’s daughter Farangis. Forood is thus Kay Khosrow’s half-brother, born a little before him, but raised in Turan with no one from Iran to teach him who is who. The tragedy lies in that ignorance.

Put Roman khaftan on your warrior frame: On the khaftān, see B7.4. Anything ‘Roman’ (rumi) in the Shahnameh, helmets, mail or brocade, is simply the best, as Byzantine work was in Ferdowsi’s day.

B12.4Forood and Tokhvar Survey the Troops

Forood and his tutor Tokhvar climb a peak to watch the Iranian army pass, and Tokhvar names each chief by his banner. Seeing the two watchers, Tus orders a rider to bring them down, or to kill them if they are spies.

Tell me the names of all who meet your sight: Another ‘view from the wall’ (see B8.16). Here the scene is sadder, since the ‘enemy’ are Forood’s own people.

Behind it stands a maiden, moonlike, fair: Bijan’s banner shows a woman, a fitting device for the young hero whose own great adventure, told in II, C2, is a love story: Bijan and Manijeh.

B12.5Bahram Meets Forood on the Mountain

Bahram rides up the mountain. Forood answers his threats courteously, names him, and proves who he is by Siavash’s birthmark. He invites the chiefs to a week’s feast before they march together, but Bahram warns that Tus is proud and may refuse.

You are no lion raging in the plain, / Nor am I Gur-e-Khar beneath your rein: The Gur-e-Khar, the wild ass of the Iranian plateau, is the favorite quarry of royal hunts; the Sasanian king Bahram Gur took his nickname from it (III, D9–D10). Forood’s retort has a prince’s dignity, and it is also a test of whether the stranger has a nobleman’s manners.

An amber mole on rose-hued skin he bore: The birthmark is the sign of Siavash’s line, a hereditary token of royal blood. Giv recognized Kay Khosrow in Turan by the same mark.

He rose against Giv, Gudarz, and the Shah, / For Fariborz and crown: When Kay Khosrow came from Turan, Tus backed Fariborz, son of Kavus, for the throne, and the quarrel was settled only by the test of the fortress of Bahman earlier in this volume. Bahram’s reminder explains Tus’s resentment and the warning of the prelude (B12.1).

B12.6Bahram Returns to Tus

Bahram tells Tus that the youth is Forood and reminds him of the Shah’s warning. Tus rages, accuses Gudarz’s sons of cowardice and calls for a warrior to bring back the prince’s head. His son-in-law Rivniz volunteers.

If he is king, then who in truth am I: The line lays bare Tus’s motive. What he cannot bear is any rival with royal blood, as he could not bear Kay Khosrow. Ferdowsi gives the commander no rational ground for the attack, and that absence is the point.

B12.7Forood Slays Rivniz

Rivniz rides up the mountain. Tokhvar names him as Tus’s son-in-law, the only brother of forty sisters, and advises Forood to shoot. Forood’s arrow pins Rivniz’s helmet to his head, and he falls dead.

He has forty sisters, springtime-fair: Tokhvar’s gossip is a grim touch: the victim is named and his mourners counted before he dies. Ferdowsi often gives a dead man’s family a single line like this, so that each death costs something.

And stitched his Roman helmet to his head: Archery is Forood’s art, as it was the great art of the steppe peoples he grew up among. Arrows that ‘stitch’ helmet to head, or shield to hand, are a favorite image in Ferdowsi’s battle scenes.

Forood drew taut his shiz bow to aim: The kamān-e shīz is a bow of shiz wood — the chaste tree, whose timber is dark, dense and springy, and was worked into bows and into the black inlay of fine boxes and thrones. The epithet marks the weapon as a costly one: Forood, shut up in a mountain fort, still shoots like a prince. The same wood supplies a color for black grief at B14.16.

B12.8Forood Slays Zarasp

Tus sends his own son Zarasp, whose wife is Rivniz’s sister, to avenge Rivniz. Tokhvar identifies him, and Forood’s arrow pins him to his saddle. His riderless horse gallops back down the mountain.

Like Azargashasp’s blaze, within your heart: Azargashasp, the fire of warriors (see B11.3), is a natural image for a fighter’s fury, and Ferdowsi uses it again for charging riders (B12.22, B12.23). The second part of the name, gushnasp, is usually explained as ‘stallion’, so the sacred fire was itself imagined as swift and fierce.

B12.9Tus Battles Forood

Tus climbs the mountain himself. Tokhvar urges Forood to retreat, then to shoot Tus’s horse rather than the commander. Tus walks back in disgrace while the fortress women jeer, and Giv declares that the prince must answer for the shame.

What should have first been spoken, he concealed: Ferdowsi blames Tokhvar. The old tutor held back the counsel that mattered, and fed his pupil’s pride with advice on where to aim. It is one of the poet’s rare direct judgements on a character’s advice.

Eighty moon-faced serving girls stood near: The watching women settle the matter. Forood cannot retreat before them without shame, a pressure the poem recognizes again and again: heroes fight to be seen, and the audience on the walls is part of the battle.

Afoot, shield at his neck, bewildered too: A warrior walking back with his shield slung at his neck is a figure of humiliation in the Shahnameh. Forood has chosen to wound Tus’s pride rather than his body, and pride is the one thing Tus cannot forgive.

B12.10Giv Battles Forood

Giv climbs the mountain, and Forood kills his horse. When Bijan mocks his father, Giv strikes him with his whip. Bijan swears revenge, borrows a horse from Gostaham, and rides up in Siavash’s mail, which Giv sends him.

It was this warrior brought your brother home: Giv spent seven years searching Turan for the young Kay Khosrow, then brought him and Farangis back to Iran across the Jihun without a boat, as told earlier in this volume. Forood is now shooting at his brother’s rescuer.

He wears Siavash’s jowshan in the fight: Siavash’s armor, which Giv brought out of Turan (see B12.23), is proof against arrows. It is the only thing that stands between Bijan and Forood’s bow, so the father’s mail helps to kill the son.

Lashed with his whip across the young man’s crest: Bijan is the poem’s hot-headed youth, and this scene introduces him well: quick to taunt, quick to swear, and loved anxiously by his father. The same rashness and the same fatherly anguish drive the story of Bijan and Manijeh in II, C2.

B12.11Bijan Battles Forood

Tokhvar warns that Bijan, Giv’s only son, wears Siavash’s mail. Forood kills his horse, but Bijan climbs on foot, takes another arrow on his shield and cuts down Forood’s horse at the gate. Forood escapes inside, and Tus swears to destroy him.

Giv has no other son; this youth is dear: Tokhvar’s advice to spare the rider is shrewd: killing Giv’s only son would make an enemy of the strongest family in Iran and grieve Kay Khosrow. Forood has now aimed three times at a horse rather than a man, a restraint none of his enemies will return.

You fled one man on foot and felt no shame: Bijan’s taunt turns the code of honor back on Forood, who mocked Tus for the same retreat (B12.9). In the Shahnameh’s world, whoever turns his back has lost, whatever the reason.

B12.12The Death of Forood

Jarireh dreams of fire consuming the fortress and wakes Forood. He arms his men and fights until noon, but his troops are killed. Rohham cuts off his arm, Bijan hamstrings his horse, and he dies inside the fortress, telling the women to leap to their deaths.

She dreamed a blazing flame climbed through the sky: Prophetic dreams in the Shahnameh always come true. Jarireh’s dream of fire echoes the dream Siavash had before his own death, of fire and of Afrasiab’s army closing in. Father and son are both warned, and neither escapes.

Gurvi Zereh dealt my father his end: Gurvi son of Zereh was the Turanian who cut Siavash’s throat. Forood sees the parallel himself, and it is exact: a guiltless son of Siavash killed by men who should have been his friends.

This drunken wheel, a juggler in its play: The lament for Forood pictures the heavens as a drunken conjuror deceiving men with seventy hands, a favorite figure of Persian poetry. It is one of Ferdowsi’s most personal outbursts: ‘My heart is straitened, empty-handed at last.’ Many readers hear the ageing, impoverished poet speaking of himself.

B12.13The Death of Jarireh

The women leap from the roof. Jarireh burns the treasure, kills the horses and stabs herself over Forood’s body. Bahram rebukes the Iranians, Gudarz rebukes Tus, and Tus weeps and builds a royal tomb for Forood, Rivniz and Zarasp.

Jarireh kindled fire with her own hands: Jarireh leaves the victors nothing: the treasure burned, the horses killed, herself dead on her son’s body. Death to escape capture is a motif of many ancient sieges, and Ferdowsi gives it full dignity. Jarireh has only a few scenes, but she is among the poem’s most memorable women.

Honar without wisdom in a heart gone wild: Gudarz puts the theme of the preludes (B11.1, B12.1) into a proverb: honar, prowess, without kherad is a rusted sword. Tus has birth and courage but lacks wisdom, and Forood is the price.

A royal tomb upon the mountain, rare: The Iranians do not expose Forood’s body, as orthodox Zoroastrian practice would require. They seat him embalmed with camphor on a throne in a sealed tomb, as the Shahnameh’s heroes are nearly always laid to rest (see B12.25). The custom is closer to the rock tombs of the Achaemenid kings than to the priestly rules.

B12.14The March to Kasa Rud

Tus lays waste the Turanian marches and camps at Kasa Rud. Bijan claims the fight with Palashan as the Shah’s charge, borrows Siavash’s mail from Giv, breaks Palashan’s back with his gorz and brings his head to Tus.

He left the marches empty, stripped and bare: Tus ignores the Shah’s order to spare the peaceful (B12.2). ‘No warp or woof remaining’ renders a Persian idiom for total ruin (tār o pud): nothing left of the fabric at all.

Now Palashan had brought a deer to ground: The Turanian champion is caught at a hunter’s meal. Ferdowsi often gives a doomed warrior a moment of ordinary life before the fight, and here it is a horse, not a sentry, that gives the alarm.

B12.15The Snowstorm Campaign

Afrasiab orders Piran to raise an army. A snowstorm buries the Iranian camp for a week, killing men and horses. Bahram blames Tus for Forood’s death, and Tus blames fate. Giv crosses the frozen river and burns the timber barrier with a fire-arrow.

For seven days the earth was lost to sight: The storm reads like a judgement on the army that killed Forood, and Tus curses Kalat and Sepid Kooh as if he half believed it. Ferdowsi never says so and leaves the link to the reader. Later, in the war with Kamus, a Turanian sorcerer calls down snow on the Iranians by magic (B13.10).

No toil is ever borne without its gain: Giv answers with a Persian commonplace: treasure comes only through toil. Ranj (toil) and ganj (treasure) make one of the favorite rhymes of Persian moral verse.

B12.16Bahram Captures Kabuda

Tus marches to Gorugard, home of the Turanian march-lord Tazhav, who sends Kabuda to scout the Iranian camp by night. Bahram, on watch, shoots him, questions him and kills him despite his plea for quarter. When Kabuda fails to return, Tazhav marches out.

His face turned black; he fell, cried zanhar, and knelt: Zanhār is a plea for quarter or protection, and granting it was a point of honor. Bahram’s killing of a man who has begged for it, and offered to guide him, is harsh by the poem’s standards. Readers may remember it when Bahram, alone and on foot, is himself refused mercy (B12.24).

B12.17The Iranians Battle Tazhav

Giv offers Tazhav, an Iranian by birth, safe conduct if he submits. Tazhav refuses; Bijan starts the battle, routs the Turanians and snatches Tazhav’s crown. Tazhav flees with Espanoye behind him, then leaves her when his horse tires. Bijan brings her to camp, and the Iranians seize Tazhav’s herds.

By birth and blood Iranian am I: Tazhav is a renegade: Iranian by birth, married into Afrasiab’s house and made his march-lord. Giv’s offer of pardon rests on that shared blood, and so does the bitterness of the end, when Giv kills him and cries out that Iranian blood is spilled on both sides (B12.25).

As falcon snatches lark from open sky: Bijan wins another of the Shah’s prizes, Tazhav’s crown, and within a few lines a third, Espanoye (see B11.6). Hunting images, falcon and lark, leopard and mountain sheep, are Ferdowsi’s commonest similes for single combat, taken from the royal sport his audience knew best.

Remain behind; I must alone now go: Tazhav saves himself and leaves Espanoye, reasoning that the Iranians will not harm her. He is right: Bijan lifts her gently onto his horse, as the Shah had ordered.

B12.18News of Tus Reaches Afrasiab

Tazhav reports the losses to Afrasiab, who blames Piran’s slowness. Piran gathers a hundred thousand men and marches by a hidden road towards Gorugard. His scouts report that Tus’s army drinks day and night and sets no watch.

They drink without a pause, their senses sunk: Drinking in camp is always punished in the Shahnameh, and Kay Khosrow will count it among Tus’s faults (B12.20). The commander who cannot govern himself cannot govern an army.

B12.19Piran’s Night Attack

Piran’s picked riders fall on the drunken Iranian camp by night. Giv, still sober, rouses whom he can, but by dawn the army is broken and flees towards the Kasa Rud with two-thirds of its men dead. Gudarz posts watchmen and sends a courier to the Shah.

Soft cushions lay beneath each sleeper’s head: A night raid was thought an unmanly way to fight, as Fariborz will protest (B12.21), but the poem leaves no doubt that the fault lies with the drunken camp. Ferdowsi spares no detail: sleepers killed on their cushions, tents abandoned, the wounded left untended.

From wind we came, and into dust we go: Man is made of the elements and returns to them (see A0.3). The thought closes many of the poem’s battle scenes, like the refrain first heard in A1.3.

B12.20Kay Khosrow Recalls Tus

Grieving for Forood and the army, Kay Khosrow writes to Fariborz, giving him command with Gudarz as adviser, and recalls Tus. Tus hands over the banner and returns. The Shah curses him, spares his life only for his royal blood, and imprisons him.

First came God’s praise, as custom, rite, and creed: Every royal letter in the Shahnameh opens with praise of God before its business, as letters did in Ferdowsi’s own world. The theology of this one, that God gives one man a throne and another misery and all of it is justice, is Kay Khosrow steadying himself as much as instructing his generals.

Manuchehr’s blood within your veins yet flows: Royal blood is Tus’s shield: as Manuchehr’s grandson through Nohzar he cannot be put to death. He will be forgiven and will lead the army again in the next book (B13.4).

May every day be Nowruz in your eyes: Tus hands over the banner with a gracious blessing, a glimpse of his better side. Wishing someone that every day be Nowruz is still a familiar Persian courtesy.

B12.21Fariborz Asks Piran for a Truce

Fariborz sends Rohham to Piran to protest the night attack and offer peace. Piran blames Tus’s ravages but grants a month’s truce, after which the Iranians must leave Turan or fight. Fariborz uses the month to pay and equip the army.

By night to raid is not the brave man’s way: The protest is a little rich from a side whose drunken camp invited attack, and Piran answers it with Tus’s raids on Turanian villages. Ferdowsi regularly gives the Turanians a fair case.

If you desire a month in which to cease: Piran’s habit of offering terms is part of his character throughout the poem, and it often costs Turan dear. Here the month’s truce lets the beaten Iranians rest, re-arm and come back to fight.

B12.22The Turanians Defeat the Iranians

The armies meet. Houman breaks the Iranian center and Fariborz flees. Giv shames Gudarz into standing firm; Bijan cuts the Kaviani banner in two to bring half of it back. Rivniz son of Kavus is killed, and Bahram saves his crown, but the Iranians are routed with terrible losses.

A rastakhiz rose vast on every side: Rastākhiz is the Resurrection at the end of time in Zoroastrian and later Persian Muslim thought, when the dead rise for judgement. Ferdowsi uses it for the uproar of battle, much as English uses ‘pandemonium’. In 1975 the word became the name of the single party of the last Shah of Iran.

When brothers stand together, back to back: Giv’s ‘ancient saying’ is the Persian version of ‘united we stand’. His appeal to Gudarz’s seventy sons is ominous: by nightfall only eight of the clan are left alive.

Then Bijan drew his violet sword and bore / Its edge against the standard that he tore: Bijan’s act is bold to the point of sacrilege: he cuts the Kaviani banner, the emblem of the realm, to take it from a prince who will not use it. Ferdowsi’s audience may have heard an echo of the real banner’s fate, cut up as spoil by the Arabs at Qadisiyya (see A5.5).

There Prince Rivniz, of royal Kavus’ strain: Not the Rivniz whom Forood shot (B12.7), Tus’s son-in-law, but a son of Kavus and a brother of Fariborz. The two men share a name, which can confuse readers. The ‘body of Rivniz’ that Bahram mourns on the battlefield (B12.23) is this one.

B12.23Bahram Returns to Seek His Whip

Bahram has lost his whip, with his name on it, on the battlefield. Refusing Giv’s offer of seven jeweled whips, he rides back by moonlight, binds a wounded comrade and finds the whip, but his horse bolts. He wounds it in anger and fights off a hundred Turanians on foot.

My name is written on its leather plain: Bahram’s whip is among the most famous episodes of the Shahnameh, a lesson in how the heroic code can kill. The whip itself is nothing; the name on it is everything, because a Turanian could hold it up and laugh at its owner. Giv, older and wiser, sees only leather and wood.

When Farangis opened wide her royal store: When Giv escaped from Turan with Kay Khosrow, Farangis opened Siavash’s treasury to him, and he took the armor that Bijan now wears (B12.10). The whip Giv offers his brother comes from the same royal store.

His charger heard the mare and, with a cry: After the high resolve comes a stallion’s instinct. The bolting horse is Ferdowsi’s cruel irony, and Bahram’s angry wounding of it is the second rash act that dooms him.

B12.24Tazhav Slays Bahram

Piran hears of Bahram and offers him friendship and rank if he will stay, but refuses him a horse home. Bahram fights on. Tazhav leads a crowd of warriors against him and, when Bahram’s strength fails, cuts off his arm from behind.

We shared both bread and salt in former days: To have eaten bread and salt together (nān o namak) creates a bond it is shameful to betray, and in Persian an ingrate is still ‘false to the salt’. Piran and Bahram knew each other when Bahram served Siavash in Turan.

Love in his heart, but prudence ruled his way: Piran’s dilemma sums up his whole role. He loves the Iranians he has known, but he fears Afrasiab and owes Turan his loyalty. Ferdowsi gives the enemy commander more humanity than he gives Tus.

Even cruel Tazhav’s heart burned at the sight: The killer’s shame is a telling detail. Tazhav, the renegade Iranian, knows that a blow from behind breaks the code, and Ferdowsi lets him feel it.

B12.25Giv Avenges Bahram

Giv and Bijan find Bahram dying. Giv catches Tazhav with his kamand at night and drags him before Bahram, who asks that his killer be spared. Giv beheads him anyway, then grieves. Bahram dies and is laid in a tomb with a crown hung above him.

Giv cast his kamand in a looping cast: The kamand, a noose of plaited rawhide, is the signature weapon of the Iranian heroes, and taking an enemy alive with it is their favorite feat. Giv’s capture of Tazhav also fulfils his pledge at Kay Khosrow’s prize-giving (B11.6).

Whether I kill, or you kill in my sight, / My brothers and my kinsmen die in fight: Giv’s cry is the poem’s bleakest verdict on the vengeance war. Tazhav was Iranian by birth (B12.17), and every blood-feud breeds the next. The narrator adds his own comment: greatness is bought by washing one’s hands in blood.

An eyvan-like dakhmeh they raised around: In later Zoroastrian usage a dakhme is a ‘tower of silence’, where the dead are exposed to the birds. In the Shahnameh the word means a royal tomb, a vaulted chamber like an eyvān, where the hero sits embalmed on a throne under his crown (compare B12.13). The difference may preserve an older, aristocratic custom.

B12.26The Iranians Return to Khosrow

The surviving Iranians agree to withdraw and await the Shah’s command, and retreat over the Kasa Rud. Piran takes the empty field and divides the spoils. Afrasiab welcomes him in triumph, loads him with gifts, and warns him to stay alert while Rostam lives.

A rich khilat whose worth was vast and great: The khil’at, or robe of honor, was a garment from the ruler’s own wardrobe, given with other gifts as the highest mark of favor at Islamic courts. Afrasiab rewards Piran exactly as the Ghaznavid sultans rewarded their generals.

While Rostam lives, whose wrath no gifts appease: Afrasiab knows where the real danger lies. Rostam has stayed at court for this campaign, and the next story, of Kamus and the war that follows, brings him back to the field (B13).