Zal and Rudaba

At a Glance

• Central figures: Zal, son of Sam and champion of Sistan, born with white hair and raised by the Simurgh on Mount Alborz; Rudaba, princess of Kabul, daughter of Mehrab, a descendant of the serpent-king Zahhak.
• Setting: Iran and the Alborz mountains, then the city of Kabul; the court of Shah Manuchehr in the age of heroes.
• The turn: Zal and Rudaba, children of enemy bloodlines, meet in secret at Rudaba’s palace, and Zal must persuade his father Sam and the Shah himself to permit the marriage.
• The outcome: Sam consults astrologers who prophesy that the union will produce a son of unmatched power; Manuchehr grants his blessing, and the marriage proceeds.
• The legacy: From this union Rostam is born - the greatest pahlavan in all Iranian legend, champion of champions across the cycles of the Shahnameh.

Zal’s hair was white at birth. Not the white of age but the white of snow on the Alborz peaks - pure, total, unsettling. His father Sam, champion of Sistan, lord of Zabulistan, looked at the infant and recoiled. He saw in the colorless hair an omen, a mark of something unhuman, and he ordered the child taken from the house and left on the mountainside to die.

The Simurgh found him. The great bird - part eagle, part peacock, older than the dynasty of kings - carried the naked infant to her nest among the high crags of Mount Alborz and raised him alongside her own fledglings. Zal grew tall and strong and strange, a man nursed on the meat the Simurgh tore for him, educated by no court and no priest, knowing the language of birds before the language of men.

Sam’s Shame

Years passed. Sam dreamed of his son. The dream came three nights in a row - a young man standing on a mountain, white-haired, calling his father’s name across a valley too wide to cross. Sam woke sick with guilt. He rode to the Alborz with his retinue, and when the Simurgh saw armed men approaching the base of her mountain, she understood.

She spoke to Zal. She told him that the man below was his father, and that his place was among men, not birds. She gave him one of her feathers and told him to burn it if he ever needed her. Then she carried him down to the valley floor and set him before Sam.

Sam wept. He knelt. He begged his son’s forgiveness. Zal, who had never seen a man kneel, said nothing for a long time. Then he went with his father to Sistan.

The Palace in Kabul

Zal grew into a warrior and a lord, white-haired still, marked still by the mountain and the bird. When he traveled to Kabul on a mission for his father, he heard of Rudaba - the daughter of Mehrab, king of Kabul. Mehrab was a vassal of the Iranian throne but his blood was old and dangerous. He was a descendant of Zahhak, the serpent-shouldered tyrant whose rule had darkened Iran for a thousand years before Fereydun brought him down.

The bloodline should have been enough to keep Zal away. It was not.

Rudaba heard of Zal, too. Her handmaidens brought her stories of the white-haired champion of Sistan, the man raised by the Simurgh, and she burned to see him. She sent her women to the riverside where Zal was camped and they arranged a meeting at Rudaba’s palace.

The Rope of Black Hair

Rudaba stood on the balcony of her tower. When she saw Zal below in the garden, she unbound her hair - black, heavy, impossibly long - and let it fall down the wall like a rope.

Climb, she said.

Zal looked at the hair hanging against the stone. He told her he would not hurt her. He took a lasso from his belt and threw it to the parapet, and climbed that way, hand over hand, up the palace wall. When he reached the balcony, Rudaba took his hand and pulled him over the edge.

They stood together and neither spoke for a moment. Then they sat, and talked through the night - about the Simurgh’s nest, about the court of Kabul, about the impossibility of what they wanted. By dawn Zal had sworn to make her his wife. Rudaba had sworn the same.

Sam Before the Shah

The problem was blood. Rudaba carried the line of Zahhak. Zal carried the line of Sam, champion of Iran. Shah Manuchehr, who sat on the throne in those days, had fought the wars against Zahhak’s remnant descendants. To ask him to bless a marriage between the Simurgh’s ward and Zahhak’s granddaughter was to ask him to tie together two threads the dynasty had spent generations cutting apart.

Zal went to his father first. Sam listened, and his face was troubled. He loved his son - the guilt of the mountain had never left him - but he feared the Shah’s anger more than he feared Zal’s unhappiness. Still, Zal pressed him, and Sam relented. He rode to court and laid the matter before Manuchehr.

Manuchehr was not pleased. He summoned his astrologers and commanded them to read the stars for this union. The astrologers cast their charts and came back astonished. They told the Shah that from this marriage would come a son who would be the mightiest warrior Iran had ever known - a champion who would serve the throne through seven reigns, who would face demons and armies and losses beyond reckoning, and whose name would outlast every king who sat on the ivory throne.

Manuchehr weighed the prophecy against the bloodline. The prophecy won. He gave his consent.

The Marriage

The wedding was held in Kabul, with Sam presiding and Mehrab hosting. Rudaba’s Zahhaki blood was mentioned by no one. The drums beat and the wine flowed and the priests chanted the old blessings, and Zal placed the crown on Rudaba’s head as the court of two kingdoms watched.

They returned to Sistan together. When Rudaba’s time came, the birth was terrible - the child was enormous, too large for ordinary delivery. Rudaba was near death. Zal burned the Simurgh’s feather.

The great bird came. She instructed the physicians on how to deliver the child, a procedure that opened Rudaba’s side and saved both mother and son. The boy came into the world laughing, the size of a yearling, with the grip of a grown man’s fist.

They named him Rostam.

Sam held the child and saw nothing of Zahhak in him. He saw the Alborz. He saw the Simurgh’s shadow. He saw Iran’s future, enormous and hungry and already reaching for a sword. The white-haired father stood beside the black-haired mother, and neither of them yet knew what their son would cost them, or what he would cost the world.