Ruyin Dezh (the Brazen Hold)

Ruyin Dezh, the Brazen Hold, is Arjasp's stronghold in Turan and the goal of Esfandiyar's seven labours. The captive Gorgsar describes it before the journey begins: walls higher than the clouds, a river around them that the king crosses by boat when he goes hunting, and fields, fruit trees and mills inside, so that it could hold out for a hundred years. When Esfandiyar finally looks down on it, the poem says, its iron walls were three farsangs high and forty wide, and four horsemen could ride side by side along the top. Two Turks he meets outside tell him thirty thousand swordsmen are inside with food for ten years, and that one gate faces Iran and the other Chin.

Esfandiyar despairs of taking it by force and goes in by guile, as a merchant called Kharrad, with a caravan of chests holding a hundred and sixty of his men. Inside he finds his sisters carrying water as slaves. He lights a fire on the walls as a signal to his brother Pashutan, kills Arjasp in his palace at night, and at dawn throws the king's head down to the troops below. Before he leaves he sets the fortress on fire and throws down its walls.

The poem never says where the Brazen Hold stood. Daqiqi's verses call Arjasp lord of Khallokh and of Paykand, a real town near Bukhara, but they do not place the fortress, and the point on this map is only a guess somewhere in Turan. The word ruyin, 'of bronze', is the same one the poem uses for Esfandiyar himself, ruyin-tan, the brazen-bodied.