Rostam

The stallion smelled the lion before the hero woke. Rostam had lain down to sleep in a bed of reeds far from home, worn out by the road, and while he slept a lion came for the horse. Rakhsh fought it alone, striking with hoof and tooth until the great cat lay dead in the mud, then went back to cropping grass. When Rostam opened his eyes to the blood and the carcass, he scolded the horse for not waking him. It was the first of seven trials, and it set the shape of everything after: the danger was real, the strength was real, and the creature he loved best kept saving his life.

He was built like a landslide. The poets of the Shahnameh never tire of his size, and Ferdowsi, who bound these stories into verse around the year 1000, gives him the epithet Tahamtan, the strong-bodied. They dress him in a cuirass cut from the hide of a monstrous tiger, the babr-e bayan, said to turn back fire and water and iron alike, and they put in his fist an ox-headed mace too heavy for an ordinary soldier to raise. Under him moves Rakhsh, a piebald stallion the color of rose petals scattered across saffron, the one horse in all Iran that could carry his weight without breaking.

He was trouble from the moment of his birth. His mother was Rudaba, princess of Kabul; his father Zal, the white-haired lord of Sistan who had been abandoned as an infant and raised on a mountain crag by the Simurgh, the great sage-bird of Persian legend. When Rudaba’s labor dragged on until she was close to death, Zal burned one of the feathers the Simurgh had given him, and the bird swept down to instruct the terrified household. Cut the child from the mother’s side, it told them, stitch the wound, soothe it with a paste and the brush of a feather. So Rostam came into the world through a cut rather than the usual door, already the size of a year-old child, so huge that ten nurses were needed to feed him.

For all his power he never reached for the crown himself. He was the maker and unmaker of kings, the man who set weak rulers back on their thrones and won their wars, yet he stayed a subject, bound by an old loyalty the kings did not always deserve. Some of them feared him. Kay Kavus once ordered him burned alive over an insult and thought better of it only because there was no one else who could win the next war.

For the length of several reigns he was Iran’s answer to catastrophe. Kings came and went, some of them vain and some of them reckless, and each time the throne stumbled into disaster it was Rostam who rode out to set it right. When Kay Kavus marched an army into Mazandaran, a land crawling with demons, the Divs blinded the whole host and threw them in chains. Rostam went in nearly alone, with only Rakhsh and a captured guide, and cut his way through the seven stations of the Haft Khan: the lion, a waterless waste that almost finished him, a dragon that reared out of the dark, a sorceress who wore a beautiful woman’s face until he spoke the name of God and she rotted away in his hands. At the last waited the White Div, a demon like a mountain of pale flesh at the bottom of a reeking pit. Rostam killed it and carried out its heart, and its blood, dripped into the king’s ruined eyes, gave him back his sight.

The darkest of his stories was one he made himself. Passing through Samangan, he spent a single night with the princess Tahmineh and fathered a son, then rode on at dawn, leaving only an armband as a token for the child. The boy, Sohrab, grew tall and gifted and went searching for the father he had never seen. They met at last on a battlefield with the armies of Iran and Turan drawn up between them, and neither knew the other. They wrestled for two days. Neither would give his name. He did not know. On the second day Rostam drove a dagger into the young man’s chest, and only as Sohrab lay dying, speaking of the father who would come to avenge him, did the armband spill out and tell Rostam what he had done. He held the body through the night. No strength in him could undo it.

His gifts were plain enough to list. In single combat he had no equal; he broke the strongest champions of Turan; he lifted what no team of men could shift; and by the reckoning of the poem he lived for centuries, outlasting most of the kings he served. Rakhsh shared in that near-tireless strength, clever and loyal, less a mount than a companion who answered to no other rider. Behind them both stood the Simurgh, a healer of last resort who could close wounds no surgeon dared touch.

The epic is careful with his limits, and every one of them is human rather than magical. His pride, set against his son’s, killed a boy whose only wish had been to find him. Against the young prince Esfandiyar, whose body had been made proof against all weapons by a bath in sacred fire, Rostam could win only through a trick the Simurgh taught him, a double-headed arrow of tamarisk loosed into the one soft place left, the eyes. It saved his life and cursed it, for killing the prince hung a doom over his own head. The end came not in battle but by treachery. His jealous half-brother Shaghad and the king of Kabul dug a broad pit, planted its floor with sword-blades and spear-points, and hid it under branches and loose earth. Riding out to what he believed was a hunt, Rostam and Rakhsh went down into the blades together. Bleeding to death, he asked Shaghad for a bow and two arrows, and with the last strength in him sent a shaft clean through the tree his brother crouched behind and through Shaghad with it. Then the mightiest hero of Iran lay still in the pit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Rostam?

Rostam is the greatest hero of Persian mythology, the champion of Iran in Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh. The son of Zal and the Kabuli princess Rudaba, he served a succession of Kayanian kings as their unmatched warrior, famed for his tiger-skin armor, his ox-headed mace, and his stallion Rakhsh.

How did Rostam die?

Rostam was killed by treachery, not in battle. His jealous half-brother Shaghad and the king of Kabul dug a pit lined with sword-blades and spear-points and lured him to ride over it, so that Rostam and Rakhsh fell in together. Dying, Rostam asked for a bow and arrows and shot Shaghad through the tree he was hiding behind before he died.

Why did Rostam kill his son Sohrab?

Rostam killed Sohrab without knowing the young warrior was his son. The two met on opposite sides of a battle between Iran and Turan, and neither revealed his name, so Rostam struck the fatal blow in single combat. Only as Sohrab lay dying did an armband Rostam had once left with the boy’s mother reveal the truth.

What is Rostam’s horse called?

Rostam’s horse is Rakhsh, a powerful piebald stallion the color of rose petals on saffron. Rakhsh was the only horse in Iran strong enough to carry Rostam’s enormous weight, and he was famously intelligent and loyal, once killing an attacking lion by himself while his master slept.

What were Rostam’s Seven Labours?

The Seven Labours, or Haft Khan, were seven trials Rostam faced to rescue King Kay Kavus and his army from the demons of Mazandaran. They included a lion, a waterless desert, a dragon, and a shape-shifting sorceress, and ended with Rostam slaying the White Div, whose heart’s blood restored the blinded king’s sight.

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Simurgh, Div, Zahhak, Kaveh the Blacksmith, Karkadann, Homa, Peri, Ahura Mazda, Anahita, Mithra, Shahmaran