The death of Rostam

At a Glance

• Central figures: Rostam, champion of Iran and the greatest pahlavan of Sistan; his half-brother Shaghad, born of a slave-woman; Shaghad’s father-in-law, the king of Kabul.
• Setting: The border between Sistan and Kabul, in the hunting grounds where the king of Kabul had ordered concealed pits dug along the trail.
• The turn: Shaghad, harboring a grudge against Rostam, conspires with the king of Kabul to lure the champion into a hunt where camouflaged pits lined with swords and lances wait beneath the earth.
• The outcome: Rostam and Rakhsh fall into the deepest pit. Impaled and dying, Rostam asks for his bow, and with his last arrow pins Shaghad to a tree.
• The legacy: Rostam’s death closes the age of heroes in the Shahnameh. The line of Sistan’s champions ends with him, and no warrior of his stature rises again in Ferdowsi’s epic.

Shaghad had been given away young. Rostam’s father Zal had sired him on a bondwoman, acknowledged him without warmth, and sent him to be raised at the court of the king of Kabul. The boy grew up knowing exactly who his brother was - every court in Iran and Turan knew who Rostam was - and knowing that Rostam had never once sent for him or spoken his name in public. Shaghad married the king of Kabul’s daughter. He settled into a life of minor royalty in a minor kingdom on the edge of Sistan, and the resentment rooted deep.

The king of Kabul paid tribute to Rostam. It was a modest sum, but it arrived each year with ceremony, and Shaghad watched his father-in-law kneel in the direction of Sistan each time the tribute-bearers departed. One evening Shaghad said to the king: What if we stopped paying?

The Insult and the Plan

Shaghad knew his brother. He knew that Rostam would not send an army over a withheld tribute from Kabul - he would come himself, because Rostam came himself for everything. That was the pride of the man, and pride was the door Shaghad intended to walk through.

The king of Kabul held a feast and publicly refused the tribute. He made a show of it, calling Rostam a bully and Sistan a backwater, words calculated to travel. They traveled. When the news reached Zal’s court, Rostam was furious - not at the money but at the insolence. He called for Rakhsh and rode south toward Kabul with a small escort.

While Rostam rode, the king of Kabul’s men were digging. Along the road that wound through the hunting grounds south of Sistan, they excavated deep pits - some accounts say five, some say seven - and lined them with upturned swords, sharpened stakes, and the blades of broken lances. They covered the pits with brush and packed earth and swept the surface until the trail looked as it had always looked. Shaghad oversaw the work. He knew the path Rostam would take because it was the only road wide enough for a man on a horse the size of Rakhsh.

The Hunting Ground

Rostam arrived at the border and found Shaghad waiting for him - smiling, apologetic, full of brotherly warmth. Shaghad said the king of Kabul had spoken rashly at the feast, that it was wine talking, that the tribute would be paid in full. He invited Rostam to hunt in the king’s preserves as a gesture of reconciliation.

Rostam hesitated. He looked at his half-brother’s face. Rakhsh stamped and pulled at the reins - the horse was uneasy, and Rakhsh’s instincts had saved Rostam before, in the seven labors and on the plains of Turan. But Rostam was old now, and he was tired, and Shaghad was family. He agreed to hunt.

They rode into the preserves together. Shaghad guided them along the prepared road. The ground gave way.

Rakhsh screamed. The great piebald horse plunged chest-first into the pit, and the blades at the bottom went through him. Rostam fell with his horse. A sword blade opened his side. A lance-point pierced his thigh. He hit the floor of the pit on top of Rakhsh’s body, and for a moment the world went dark.

The Pit

When he opened his eyes, he was looking up at a circle of sky. The pit was deep. Rakhsh was still breathing beneath him, but the horse’s legs were shattered, and the blades had done their work. Rostam pulled himself off the horse and stood, and the pain was extraordinary - the kind that narrows the world to a single bright point.

Shaghad appeared at the edge of the pit. He looked down at Rostam, and the mask of brotherhood was gone. He did not speak. He did not need to.

Rostam understood everything. The withheld tribute, the apology, the invitation to hunt. He looked at his half-brother’s face above him and saw the years of resentment arranged into a plan, and he knew he had walked into it like a fool.

He said: Give me my bow.

Shaghad laughed. He said Rostam was a dead man in a hole and had no use for a bow. But Rostam said it again - give me my bow, or I will climb out of this pit and kill you with my hands - and Shaghad, who knew what Rostam’s hands could do even now, even bleeding, felt something cold move through him. He ordered a servant to lower the bow and two arrows into the pit. He reasoned that a dying man could do no harm, and he stepped behind a thick-trunked plane tree at the pit’s edge.

The Last Arrow

Rostam fitted the arrow to the string. His hands were wet with blood. The bow was his own - the great war-bow that no other man in Iran could draw - and he drew it now with the last of what he had.

He could see the trunk of the plane tree. He could see Shaghad’s outline behind it. The tree was broad, but Rostam had been shooting since before Shaghad was born.

The arrow went through the tree and through Shaghad and pinned him to the wood. Shaghad hung there, mouth open, the shaft through his chest. He died against the bark, fixed to it like a thing displayed.

Rostam set down the bow. Rakhsh had stopped breathing. The champion of Iran lowered himself to the floor of the pit beside his horse and closed his eyes.

After the Pit

When Rostam’s men found him, he was dead. They brought his body and the body of Rakhsh back to Sistan, and old Zal - who had outlived his son, the one thing in the world he had feared most - wept until he could not stand. They buried Rostam in a stone tomb in Sistan. Rakhsh they buried beside him.

No one of Rostam’s strength rose again in Iran. The wars with Turan continued, the kings came and went, but the age when a single champion could ride out alone and turn the course of a war was finished. Ferdowsi, writing a thousand years later, gave Rostam more lines than any other figure in the Shahnameh, and when he came to the death in the pit, he wrote that the stars themselves grew dim. The hero’s bones stayed in Sistan. The story carried the grief outward, and it has not set it down.