Arash the Archer

At a Glance

• Central figures: Arash the Archer, a common soldier of Iran; Afrasiab, king of Turan; Manuchehr, shah of Iran.
• Setting: Iran after a devastating war with Turan, when the Iranian armies had been driven back to the slopes of the Alborz mountains and Manuchehr held only a sliver of his kingdom.
• The turn: To end the war, both sides agreed that a single arrow shot from the peak of Mount Damavand would determine the border between Iran and Turan - wherever the arrow landed, there the frontier would stand.
• The outcome: Arash climbed Damavand at dawn, drew his bow, and loosed an arrow that flew from morning until noon, crossing rivers and plains until it struck a walnut tree on the banks of the Oxus. Iran’s border was restored. Arash fell dead on the mountaintop, his life spent in the shot.
• The legacy: The festival of Tirgan, celebrated on the thirteenth day of the month of Tir, marks the flight of Arash’s arrow and the restoration of Iran’s lands.

The war had gone badly. Afrasiab’s Turanian cavalry had crossed the Oxus, driven through Khorasan, and pushed the Iranian forces back until Manuchehr’s army stood with the Alborz at its spine and nothing behind it but rock and snow. The shah held council in a tent pitched against the mountainside, and the talk was of terms - not victory.

Afrasiab sent word: he would accept a truce. The border between Iran and Turan would be fixed by the flight of an arrow. One archer, one shot, from the summit of Damavand. Wherever the arrow fell, that line would divide the two kingdoms. Whatever lay on Afrasiab’s side of the arrow’s fall, Iran would surrender. Whatever lay on the Iranian side, Turan would withdraw from.

Afrasiab was not generous. He believed no arrow could fly far enough to save Iran anything worth having. The peak of Damavand was deep inside Iranian territory; from there, an ordinary bow might cast an arrow a few leagues at best, and the Turanians would keep everything they had taken.

The Soldier on the Mountain

Manuchehr asked for a volunteer. The champion who took the bow would carry the fate of Iran in his hands, and every man in the camp understood what that meant. If the arrow fell short - if it dropped into the foothills or the near plains - the kingdom was finished. The Turanians would hold the river valleys, the farmland, the cities. Iran would be a strip of mountain.

The man who stepped forward was not a pahlavan of famous lineage. He was not Rostam. He was not Zal. He was a foot soldier named Arash, from the common ranks, a man known to his company for his skill with the bow and nothing else. No one had sung his name. No songs would need to be corrected after he was dead.

Arash asked for time to prepare the bow. He asked for the finest wood, the strongest sinew, the straightest shaft anyone in the army could find. The fletchers brought him arrows; he refused them all and made his own. He worked through the night. The men of the camp watched him in the firelight, shaping the shaft, winding the string, testing the draw again and again.

Before dawn he began to climb Damavand.

The Peak of Damavand

Damavand is the highest peak in Iran, a volcanic cone that rises above the Alborz range and stands alone against the sky. Snow sits on it year-round. The air at the summit is thin and the wind cuts through armor. Arash climbed past the snowline in the gray hour before sunrise, carrying his bow and the single arrow.

At the summit he stopped and faced northeast - toward Turan, toward the Oxus, toward the lands Iran had lost. Below him the plains spread out in the early light, brown and gold, crossed by rivers. Somewhere out there, impossibly far, lay the walnut groves along the Oxus where the old border had once been marked.

He stripped to the waist. He set his feet on the rock. He nocked the arrow.

Those who watched from below - and both armies were watching, Iranians from the western slopes, Turanians from the plains - said that when Arash drew the bow, his body changed. The draw was beyond what a man’s arms should have sustained. The bow bent past its natural limit. The string sang a note that carried down the mountain.

He loosed.

The Arrow’s Flight

The arrow left the bow at dawn. It did not arc and fall as arrows do. It flew straight and level, like a thrown lance, and it kept flying. It crossed the foothills. It crossed the salt plains. It crossed the rivers. The Turanian scouts on the near plains saw it pass overhead and could not believe what they saw - a single shaft, still climbing, still holding its line, moving faster than any bird.

It flew from sunrise until midday. The stories say it covered a distance that would take a rider forty days to cross. It passed over cities Afrasiab had taken. It passed over farmland, over orchards, over the wide brown stretches of steppe. It did not slow.

At noon, on the far bank of the Oxus - the Jeyhun - the arrow struck a walnut tree and buried itself to the fletching in the trunk.

The border was fixed. Everything on the Iranian side of that tree belonged to Manuchehr. Iran’s lands were restored in a single flight.

The Price

On the summit of Damavand, Arash lay dead. He had put everything he had into the shot - not just his strength but his life, his breath, his years. The bow lay beside him, split along the grain. His body was cold by the time the first men reached him.

Manuchehr’s soldiers carried him down the mountain and buried him with the honors of a king, though he had been a common soldier. The fletchers kept pieces of the broken bow. The story passed into the memory of Iran and did not leave it.

Afrasiab honored the agreement. He had no choice; his own terms had been met. The Turanian armies withdrew beyond the Oxus, and the walnut tree with the arrow in its trunk stood on the border for years afterward, until the wood rotted and the shaft crumbled, but by then the line was fixed and neither side disputed it.

Tirgan

Every year, on the thirteenth day of the month of Tir - the hottest stretch of the Iranian summer - the festival of Tirgan remembers the arrow’s flight. Water is thrown and splashed in the streets, partly because Tir is the month of rain and partly because the Oxus, the river the arrow crossed, is the thread that runs through the story. People tie rainbow-colored bands around their wrists. The bands are called tir-o-bad - “arrow and wind.”

No one sings of Arash’s lineage, because there is none worth singing. He was a soldier. He had a bow. He climbed a mountain and did not come down alive, and when the arrow struck wood on the far side of Iran, the kingdom that had been dying was whole again. The walnut tree held.