Birth of Rostam

At a Glance

• Central figures: Zal, son of Sam and champion of Sistan, raised by the Simurgh on Mount Alborz; Rudabeh, princess of Kabul, daughter of Mehrab; and Rostam, the child whose birth nearly killed his mother.
• Setting: Sistan and Kabul in the age of the early kings of Iran; the court of Zal and the chambers where Rudabeh labored.
• The turn: Rudabeh’s labor went wrong - the child was too large to be born, and she lay dying until Zal called the Simurgh for help.
• The outcome: The Simurgh instructed Zal in the cutting of Rudabeh’s side, and Rostam was delivered alive - enormous, unnatural in size, and hungry from his first breath.
• The legacy: Rostam grew to become Iran’s greatest pahlavan, the champion whose name runs through the Shahnameh from this moment to his death in the pit of spears at Shaghad’s hands.

Rudabeh had been in labor for a day and a night, and the child would not come. The women attending her had tried everything they knew. They pressed warm cloths to her belly, they gave her herbs, they sang the old songs meant to ease the passage. Nothing worked. Rudabeh screamed until she could no longer scream, and then she lay still, her face the color of ash, her pulse thin under Zal’s fingers.

Zal knelt beside her and understood that she was dying. The child inside her was killing her - not out of malice, but out of sheer impossible size. The physicians of Sistan had never seen anything like it. They shook their heads and would not meet his eyes.

The Feather

Zal had carried one thing with him since boyhood: a feather from the Simurgh. The great bird had given it to him when she sent him down from Mount Alborz, where she had raised him in her nest after his father Sam abandoned him as an infant - white-haired, strange, unwanted. The Simurgh had fed him, sheltered him, taught him. When the time came for Zal to return to the world of men, she plucked a feather from beneath her wing.

When you are in true need, she told him, burn this feather. I will come.

He had never burned it. He had fought battles, survived betrayals, navigated the treacherous politics of Kay Kavus’s court, and he had kept the feather wrapped in silk inside a leather case. But Rudabeh’s face was gray and her breathing had gone shallow, and the child - his child - was lodged inside her like a stone in a wall.

Zal took the feather to the courtyard. He lit a fire of sandalwood and held the feather over the flame. It caught. The smoke that rose from it was not ordinary smoke - it climbed straight up into a windless sky, a dark column that did not disperse.

The Simurgh’s Descent

She came from the direction of the Alborz, enormous, her shadow passing over the rooftops of Zal’s palace like a cloud. The women in the birthing chamber heard the sound of her wings before they saw her - a deep rhythmic beating, like war-drums struck from above. She settled in the courtyard, and the stones cracked under her weight.

Zal ran to her. He did not bow, because she had raised him and he was her fosterling, not her subject. He spoke to her as a son speaks to a mother.

She is dying. The child cannot come out. Tell me what to do.

The Simurgh regarded him with one golden eye. She was ancient beyond reckoning - older than the dynasty of Jamshid, older than the division of Iran and Turan. She had seen the births of heroes before.

Bring me wine, she said. Bring me a priest who knows the knife. And bring me musk and herbs.

The Cutting

What the Simurgh described was something no one in Sistan had heard of. She told Zal to give Rudabeh enough wine to dull the pain and cloud her awareness. Then a skilled man - she specified a priest, a mobed, someone whose hands were steady and whose knowledge of the body was precise - was to cut into Rudabeh’s side, through the skin and the muscle beneath, and take the child out through the opening.

Zal listened. He did not argue. The physicians in the room went pale, but Zal had been raised by a bird on a mountaintop and his sense of what was possible had always been wider than other men’s.

The mobed was brought. He was an old man with clean hands and a steady voice. The Simurgh told him where to cut - low on the left side, along a specific line. She told Zal to prepare the musk and a poultice of milk and herbs, and to have a needle and silk thread ready.

Rudabeh was given wine until she no longer knew where she was. The mobed made the incision. Blood came, and then the pink gleam of muscle, and then - pressed against the wall of her womb like something trying to break through a door - the shape of the child.

They pulled him free. He was enormous. His body was the size of a yearling calf, red and slick and furious. He opened his mouth and roared - not cried, roared - and the women in the room stepped back from the sound. His hands were already clenched.

The mobed sewed Rudabeh’s wound closed with silk thread while Zal held her. The Simurgh instructed him to pass her feather - a new one she plucked from her wing on the spot - over the wound, and under the feather’s shadow the flesh knit faster than any wound should heal. The color returned to Rudabeh’s face. She breathed deeply. She slept.

The Name and the Nursing

They named the child Rostam. When Rudabeh woke and saw him, she wept - partly from relief, partly from something like awe. The baby was not like other babies. He needed the milk of ten wet-nurses to be satisfied, and when he was weaned he ate the food of five grown men. His growth was visible almost day by day. At an age when other children were learning to walk, Rostam was the size of a boy of eight.

Zal watched his son and saw something both wonderful and frightening. The farr - the divine glory that marked kings and champions - sat on Rostam’s brow even as an infant, visible to those who knew how to look. This child had come into the world through a wound, summoned by smoke and the knowledge of a bird older than the mountains, and nothing about his existence was ordinary.

The Simurgh departed after the birth. She rose from the courtyard and the cracks her talons had left in the flagstones remained - they were never repaired, and in later years men would come to Zal’s palace in Sistan simply to see the marks. She flew north toward the Alborz and did not look back.

Rostam grew. By the time he was a young man he had killed the white elephant that terrorized the marches of Sistan, striking it with a single blow of a mace so heavy no other warrior could lift it. He chose Rakhsh from among the herds - a horse the color of rose petals scattered over saffron, fierce and half-wild, who would carry him through every labor and every war until the end. He became the pahlavan of Iran, the shield of the throne, the name that Turanian generals spoke in whispers.

But he had entered the world through a cut in his mother’s side, pulled out by a priest’s hands while a bird from before the age of kings watched, and the strangeness of that beginning never entirely left him.