Simurgh raising Zal

At a Glance

• Central figures: Zal, albino son of the warrior Sam, and the Simurgh, the great bird of the Alborz mountains who raised him from infancy.
• Setting: Iran and the peaks of the Alborz, in the age of the earliest pahlavans of the Sistan line, as told in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.
• The turn: Sam, shamed by the birth of a white-haired child, orders the infant exposed on a mountainside, where the Simurgh finds him and carries him to her nest.
• The outcome: Zal grows to manhood among the Simurgh’s fledglings, is reclaimed by his father after a prophetic dream, and returns to Iran bearing the Simurgh’s feather - a token of her protection.
• The legacy: The Simurgh’s feather, which Zal carries for the rest of his life and which, when burned, summons the great bird in times of mortal need - most famously at the birth of Rostam.

Sam had wanted a son for years. He prayed for one, sacrificed for one, waited through his wife’s long pregnancy with the restless pride of a man certain the child would match him. The child was born whole and strong - broad across the chest, loud in the lungs. But his hair was white. Not the pale gold of some northern peoples. White as snow on the Alborz, white as an old man’s beard. The nurses saw it first and none of them wanted to carry the news.

When Sam finally looked at the child, he turned away.

The Mountainside

Sam called the infant a child of Ahriman. He said the white hair was a mark of divs, a curse smuggled into his bloodline. He could not bear the whispers he imagined spreading through the courts of Iran - Sam the champion, Sam the pahlavan of Sistan, father of a thing that looked like no child of a warrior house. He ordered the baby taken from his mother and left on the slope of Mount Damavand, high in the Alborz where the rocks broke through the snowline and the wind never stopped.

The servants carried the infant up. They set him on bare stone, still wrapped in cloth, and walked back down without looking behind them.

Sam returned to his hall and drank and told himself the child had been ill-made, that no blame attached to the father. He did not sleep well. He did not sleep well for a long time.

The Nest

The Simurgh saw the child from her flight. She was vast - her wingspan threw shadows across whole valleys, and her plumage held every color found in the feathers of lesser birds, copper and green and the deep blue-black of a starling’s throat. She had nested on the highest peak of the Alborz since before men kept records. Her young were in the nest when she descended and took the infant in her talons, gently, the way she carried her own fledglings, and bore him upward.

She fed him. The accounts do not say what she fed him at first - milk was impossible, meat unlikely for a newborn. What the Shahnameh says is that the Simurgh raised Zal as one of her own, and that he lived. He lived among feathers and bone and the stripped carcasses of mountain deer, in a nest of woven branches wider than a king’s pavilion, on a ledge so high that the clouds sat below it. He grew. His white hair grew long and tangled in the wind, and he learned to move on the ledge with the sureness of a creature born to it. He did not know he was human. He did not know there was a world below the clouds.

The Simurgh’s fledglings grew beside him and launched themselves from the ledge, and he watched them go and did not understand why he could not follow.

Sam’s Dream

Years passed. Sam’s reputation held. He fought the enemies of Iran, he served his shah, he carried his mace into the field as he always had. But the thing he had done sat in him like a stone in water, and one night he dreamed.

He dreamed of a young man standing on a mountain, tall, white-haired, with the bearing of a warrior and the eyes of someone who had never seen a city. A rider came to Sam in the dream and said: Your son is alive. The Simurgh has raised him. Go and find him before God finds you wanting.

Sam woke in the dark and wept. He wept with the particular grief of a man who knows the wrong was his and cannot take it back, only walk toward it. He gathered a company of men and rode for the Alborz.

The Descent

They found the peak by the circling of the Simurgh overhead. Sam could not climb to the nest - no man could - and he knelt at the base of the mountain and prayed, and the Simurgh saw him.

She knew who he was. She had always known. She spoke to Zal - the first human words he had heard since the servants left him on the rocks, though the Simurgh had spoken to him in her own way for all his life.

A man has come for you. He is your father. He left you here when you were born, and now he wants you back.

Zal looked down through the clouds at the shapes of men and horses far below. He did not want to leave. The nest was the only world he had. The Simurgh was his mother in every way that mattered, and the high cold air was his country.

But the Simurgh told him he was a man, not a bird. She told him his fate lay below, among his own kind, and that his line would produce the greatest pahlavan Iran would ever know. She plucked a feather from her breast - long and shimmering, barred with gold and violet - and gave it to him.

When you are in need beyond all remedy, burn this feather. I will come.

She carried him down the mountain. Sam saw his son set on the ground before him - a young man now, tall and straight-backed, his white hair streaming in the wind like a banner, his skin browned by the mountain sun but marked by no corruption, no sign of divs. Sam fell to his knees and pressed his face against his son’s feet and asked forgiveness.

Zal did not answer for a long moment. Then he raised his father up.

The Feather

They rode back to Sistan. Sam presented Zal at court, and the shah received him, and the whispers that had once shamed Sam turned to wonder. The white-haired son of Sam carried himself like a prince raised among eagles, and men respected what they could not understand.

Zal kept the Simurgh’s feather. He kept it close, wrapped in silk, carried against his body. He did not burn it lightly or often. But he burned it once when Tahmineh labored to deliver their son and the birth was killing her - the child too large, the bleeding too great. The smoke rose and the Simurgh came, and she told them how to cut and save both mother and child.

The child was Rostam. He came into the world enormous, hungry, and screaming, and the Simurgh’s shadow passed over the house as she turned back toward the Alborz.