Fereydun defeating Zahhak

At a Glance

Central figures: Zahhak, the serpent-shouldered usurper who fed his shoulder-snakes on the brains of young men; Kaveh the blacksmith of Isfahan, who raised the revolt; Fereydun, descended from the line of Jamshid, who overthrew Zahhak and bound him beneath Mount Damavand.
Setting: Iran under Zahhak’s thousand-year tyranny, ending at Zahhak’s palace and the slopes of Mount Damavand in the Alborz range.
The turn: Kaveh, who had lost seventeen sons to the serpents, refused to surrender his eighteenth and raised his leather apron as a banner of rebellion, rallying the people behind Fereydun.
The outcome: Fereydun defeated Zahhak in single combat with his ox-headed mace, and on the counsel of the angel Sraosha, chained Zahhak alive inside a cave on Mount Damavand rather than killing him.
The legacy: Kaveh’s leather apron, the Derafsh-e Kaviani, became the royal battle standard of Iran, carried into war by every dynasty that followed until the Arab conquest.

Zahhak had two serpents growing from his shoulders. They had sprouted where Ahriman, disguised as a cook, had kissed him - one on each side, black and restless, and no surgeon could cut them away. They grew back overnight. The physicians who tried lost their hands. In time, Zahhak stopped trying to remove them. He learned instead what quieted them: the brains of young men, two each day, one for each serpent. Across Iran the levy was enforced. Two youths taken daily, their skulls opened, their brains scooped out and fed warm to the things on the king’s shoulders. A thousand years of this.

Zahhak sat on the throne that had belonged to Jamshid, the king of the golden age, whose farr - the divine glory that legitimated kings - had departed him when pride entered his heart. Jamshid had fled and been sawn in half. Now Zahhak ruled, and Iran bent under him like a bow strung too tight.

Kaveh’s Eighteenth Son

In Isfahan there lived a blacksmith named Kaveh. He had fathered eighteen sons. Seventeen had been taken for the serpents. He had watched them go, one by one, led away by Zahhak’s men to the palace kitchens. When the soldiers came for the eighteenth - a boy still young enough that the soot on his face came from standing too close to his father’s forge, not from working it - Kaveh struck the king’s messenger with his hammer and walked into the street.

He wore his leather blacksmith’s apron. He tied it to a pole and raised it above his head, and the people of Isfahan saw it and understood. They came out of their houses. They came out of the workshops and the stables and the alleyways where they had been hiding their own sons, and they followed the apron. It was not a royal banner. It was scorched and cracked and stained with years of iron-work. But it was the thing Kaveh had, and he raised it, and it was enough.

The revolt spread. Word reached a young man named Fereydun, who had been hidden since birth in the Alborz mountains because Zahhak’s astrologers had warned that a descendant of Jamshid’s line would one day destroy him. Fereydun’s mother had entrusted him to the keeper of a miraculous cow called Barmayeh, whose milk had nourished him. Zahhak had found and killed Barmayeh; Fereydun’s mother had then sent him higher into the mountains, to a hermit, beyond the king’s reach. Now Fereydun was grown. He came down from the Alborz and joined Kaveh’s uprising.

The Ox-Headed Mace

Fereydun needed a weapon. He went to a blacksmith - some tellings say Kaveh himself forged it - and had an iron mace made in the shape of an ox’s head, heavy and blunt, with two curved horns. The mace was called the gorz-e gavsar, the ox-headed mace, and it became the weapon Fereydun carried for the rest of his life. He lifted it, tested its weight, and was satisfied.

With Kaveh’s army behind him, Fereydun marched on Zahhak’s capital. They crossed the Arvand River. Some of Zahhak’s own soldiers - men who had served the serpent-king out of terror, not loyalty - opened the gates. Fereydun entered the palace. Zahhak was not there. He had gone south, hunting for Fereydun in the wrong direction, chasing rumors and astrologers’ guesses.

Fereydun sat on the throne. He freed the young men and women Zahhak had imprisoned. He opened the palace granaries. He waited.

The Return and the Fight

Zahhak came back. He came at night, scaling his own palace walls with a dagger in his teeth, moving like the creature Ahriman had made him. He found Fereydun in the throne room.

The fight was short and brutal. Zahhak was supernaturally strong - a thousand years of Ahriman’s favor had hardened him beyond ordinary men - but Fereydun had the farr. The divine glory that had left Jamshid had passed through the line and come to rest on Fereydun. He struck Zahhak across the shoulders with the ox-headed mace. He struck him in the head. Zahhak went down. Blood poured from the serpent-king’s skull, and the two serpents on his shoulders writhed and hissed and snapped at the air.

Fereydun raised the mace to crush Zahhak’s head entirely.

Sraosha’s Warning

The angel Sraosha appeared. He spoke to Fereydun directly.

Do not kill him. His blood will poison the earth. Bind him instead.

Fereydun lowered the mace. He looked at Zahhak bleeding on the stone floor, the serpents still alive, still hungry, still twitching toward the nearest human warmth, and he did not strike the final blow.

He had Zahhak chained - wrists, ankles, and neck - with heavy iron chains. He dragged him to Mount Damavand, the great volcanic peak of the Alborz. There, inside a cave high on the mountainside, he drove iron stakes into the rock and hung Zahhak from them, suspended in darkness. The serpents could not reach anything to feed on. They gnawed at the air. Zahhak screamed, and the mountain swallowed the sound.

Fereydun sealed the cave and descended.

The Banner That Remained

Iran was free. Fereydun took the throne and ruled justly, dividing the world among his three sons - a decision that would bring its own grief in time, but that grief was still far off. For the present, the serpent-king hung in the mountain, and the people breathed.

Kaveh’s leather apron was adorned. Jewels were sewn into it - rubies, gold thread, strips of red and yellow and violet silk - until it became the Derafsh-e Kaviani, the royal standard of Iran. Every shah who came after Fereydun carried it into battle, and armies rallied to it for centuries. It was still a blacksmith’s apron underneath. The jewels could not hide the scorch marks.

On Damavand, Zahhak remained alive. The tradition holds that he hangs there still, that the chains will hold until the end of the world, and that on the day they break, the serpent-king will crawl out of the mountain and devour a third of mankind before he is finally destroyed. The mountain is visible from Tehran on clear days. It smokes sometimes.