Bahram Gur in India

Bahram's minister warned him that Shangal, king of Hind, was growing proud and that his raiders reached from Hindustan to the borders of Chin. Bahram decided to see for himself. A letter was written demanding tribute or war, and the king carried it in person, posing as his own envoy. At Qannuj (Kannauj) he found Shangal on a golden throne with crystal steps, amid elephants and the din of Indian bells. Shangal read the letter, boasted of his treasure, his armies and the eighty crowned kings who served him, and said that if it were the custom to kill envoys he would have the stranger's head.

The envoy proposed a test instead: let two of Shangal's wise men debate one Iranian, or a hundred of his horsemen fight one. Shangal preferred a feast. When the wine had gone round, two wrestlers fought for the guests, and Bahram asked leave to take a turn. He seized one by the waist and threw him down so hard that his bones broke. Next day, on the polo ground, he split the mark with a single arrow.

Barzui

Shangal was now sure his guest was more than an envoy, perhaps the king's brother. He sent his minister to offer a province where the trees fruited twice a year and to ask the man's name. Bahram went pale. He would not turn from his own king for any treasure, he said, and his name was Barzui. So Shangal looked for a way to be rid of him. He sent him first against a karg, a monstrous beast (often read as a rhinoceros; Warner's text has a wolf) that had driven the lions out of its forest. Bahram's companions begged him not to fight a mountain. If God had given his dust to Hindustan, he answered, he could not die anywhere else. He shot it full of arrows and cut off its head. Then Shangal sent him to a dragon by the water that could swallow elephants. Bahram sewed up its jaws with poisoned arrows, put four more into its head, split its heart and sent the head to the king.

Shangal's counsellors talked him out of killing his guest in secret, so he tried to bind him instead, with a marriage and the command of his army. Bahram, telling himself that the lion was caught in the fox's net, accepted. Of Shangal's three daughters he chose Sepinud, "a straight cypress, a lamp without smoke".

The flight

Sepinud discovered who her husband was and loved him the more. When he told her he meant to go home, she made the plan. In five days the king and the whole court would go to a festival in a forest twenty leagues away. On the day she told her father that Barzui was ill. Bahram had already met some Iranian merchants by the river and bound them by oath to silence. That night he set Sepinud on a horse, woke the merchants and crossed the water by boat.

Shangal caught up with them at the river and called his daughter a wanton and Bahram a faithless Persian. Bahram told him who he was: king of kings of Iran and Turan, who would honour him as a father and ask no tribute. Shangal took off his Indian turban, rode up to ask pardon and embraced him, and the two kings swore friendship. At the fire temple of Azar Goshasp the high priest taught Sepinud the faith and bathed her in clean water. Later Shangal came to Iran with seven kings to visit her.

The poem adds a coda. When the poor complained that only the rich drank to music, Bahram asked Shangal for ten thousand Luri, men and women who played the barbat (lute). He gave each an ox, a donkey and wheat, so that they could farm and play for the poor without charge. A year later they had eaten the oxen and the seed. Bahram told them to load their donkeys and string their instruments, and the poem ends, unkindly, with the Luri wandering the roads day and night.