Peri and div stories

At a Glance

• Central figures: A peri named Golnar, bound in iron by the div Fulad-zereh; Tahmuras, the third king of Iran, called Div-band - the Binder of Demons; and the sorcerer-div Akoman, whose name means Evil Mind.
• Setting: Iran in the age of its earliest kings, when divs still held dominion over the mountains and forests of Mazandaran, and peris moved between the visible world and the hidden one.
• The turn: Tahmuras rides against the divs of Mazandaran after learning that Fulad-zereh has captured Golnar and other peris, binding them with chains of cold iron to drain their light.
• The outcome: Tahmuras defeats the divs and forces them to teach him the art of writing - the script of thirty letters - as ransom for their lives. The peris are freed. Fulad-zereh is bound in his own chains.
• The legacy: The divs’ ransom gave Iran its written script, and the freed peris returned to their hidden gardens - but the enmity between peri and div, light and darkness, remained woven into every Iranian story that followed.

The peris had gardens that no living man had seen. They grew behind the wind, in places where water ran upward and the air smelled of rosewater and amber. The peris themselves were beautiful past description - Ferdowsi says simply that they shone, that their faces were like the moon, that where they walked flowers opened in dead ground. They were not human. They were not divine in the way Ahura Mazda was divine. They occupied a middle country between the seen and unseen, and they could be harmed.

The divs knew this. The divs had always known it.

Fulad-zereh’s Chains

Fulad-zereh was a div of enormous strength whose body could not be pierced by ordinary weapons. His skin was like hammered bronze, and he lived in a fortress carved into the rock face of the Alborz mountains, where the air was thin and the passes narrow enough that a single div could hold them against an army. He hated the peris with the particular hatred of something ugly for something bright, and he had spent centuries devising chains that could hold them.

Iron was the key. Cold iron, forged without fire - shaped by pressure and grinding in the dark. A peri bound in cold iron lost her radiance. Her wings, which were not exactly wings but something closer to a quality of movement, went still. She became visible, solid, trapped in a single place. Fulad-zereh had learned this from Akoman, the chief of divs, whose knowledge of cruelty was inexhaustible.

Golnar was the first peri taken. She had come too close to the visible world - drawn, some said, by a garden in Isfahan where a poet was singing. Fulad-zereh’s servants seized her at the boundary between worlds and dragged her into the mountain. The chains went around her wrists. The light went out of her face.

After Golnar, others were taken. The peris sent messengers - bright birds, dreams that fell into the sleep of righteous men - asking for help. The dreams reached Tahmuras.

Tahmuras Div-band

Tahmuras was the third king of Iran after Gayomard and Hushang. He was called Div-band - the Binder of Demons - because he had already broken the power of several lesser divs who troubled the plains of Iran. He rode a horse the color of night, and he carried a mace rather than a sword, because divs’ hides turned blades but broke under blunt force.

When the dreams came to him, Tahmuras understood them at once. He called his warriors together and told them what he intended.

We ride for Mazandaran.

His advisors protested. Mazandaran was the divs’ country, a land of sorcery and fog where rivers ran backward and the trees moved when no wind blew. No Iranian king had taken an army there and returned whole. But Tahmuras had a quality that the Shahnameh attributes to all the great kings: farr, the divine glory, the nimbus of legitimate authority that Ahura Mazda grants and Ahriman cannot counterfeit. The farr burned in Tahmuras like a lamp behind glass. The divs could feel it from a distance, and it hurt them.

He rode north into the mountains with five hundred men.

The Fortress in the Alborz

The pass was narrow, as Tahmuras had been warned. Divs held the heights, rolling boulders down onto the column. Tahmuras dismounted and climbed the rock face himself, mace in one hand, and when he reached the first div he struck it across the jaw and the creature fell six hundred feet onto the stones below.

The others scattered. Divs are strong but they are also cowards when the farr is against them; this is a constant in the Shahnameh. Tahmuras’s men moved through the pass and came to Fulad-zereh’s fortress.

Fulad-zereh came out to meet him. He was enormous - taller than three men standing on each other’s shoulders, his arms thick as the trunks of plane trees, his face flat and brutal with two tusks curving upward from his lower jaw. He carried no weapon; his fists were enough.

Tahmuras circled him on his dark horse, then dismounted. He could not fight this from horseback. The div swung. Tahmuras moved under the blow and brought the mace up into Fulad-zereh’s ribs. The sound was like a smith striking an anvil. Fulad-zereh staggered but did not fall.

They fought for the length of a day. By evening, Tahmuras had broken both of Fulad-zereh’s arms at the elbow. The div collapsed onto his knees in the stone courtyard of his own fortress, and Tahmuras took the cold-iron chains from the walls where Golnar and the other peris were bound, and he wrapped those chains around Fulad-zereh’s body seven times.

The div screamed. Cold iron burned div-flesh the way it stilled peri-light.

The Ransom of Letters

Tahmuras did not kill the divs. This is the extraordinary detail in Ferdowsi’s account: he could have destroyed them, and no one would have blamed him. Instead, he demanded ransom.

Teach me what you know.

The divs knew many things. They had lived since the beginning of the world’s corruption, since Ahriman first broke through the sky and brought death and cold and darkness into creation. They knew the hidden properties of minerals. They knew the courses of the stars. And they knew writing - the script of thirty letters by which speech could be fixed in visible form and carried across distance and time.

Tahmuras took this knowledge. He brought it back to Iran. The divs, in teaching him, diminished themselves; they gave away one of their few advantages over human beings, the ability to record and transmit knowledge without relying on fragile memory.

Golnar’s Return

Golnar stood in the courtyard after her chains were struck off. Her light returned slowly, like dawn - first a faint glow at the edges of her face, then a brightness that made the warriors look away.

She did not thank Tahmuras. Peris do not operate by human courtesies. She looked at him once, and in that look - Ferdowsi does not say what passed, only that Tahmuras remembered it for the rest of his life - and then she was gone. She stepped sideways, or upward, or through, and the courtyard held only soldiers and bound divs and the smell of blood on stone.

The other peris followed. One by one they faded from visibility, returning to their gardens behind the wind.

Tahmuras rode south with his five hundred men and the knowledge of thirty letters. He taught the script to his scribes. The scribes wrote down the king’s laws, his lineage, the names of the divs he had conquered. Iran became a kingdom that could remember itself across generations.

The peris were never seen in such numbers again. They retreated deeper into the unseen, and the boundary between their world and the visible one grew thicker and harder to cross. But on certain nights - when the air smelled of rosewater for no reason, when a garden bloomed out of season - people said a peri had passed through, briefly, and gone again.