Kamus of Kashan

Kay Khosrow forgives Tus at Rostam's request and sends him back to Turan. The second campaign goes no better than the first. Piran has a sorcerer, Bazur, who climbs a mountain and calls down snow and bitter cold; the Iranians' hands freeze to their spears and the Turanians cut them down. Rohham climbs the mountain and cuts off the sorcerer's hand, and the sky clears, but the day is lost and many of Gudarz's sons and grandsons are dead or captured. The army falls back to Mount Hamavan, and Piran surrounds it.

Afrasiab sends Piran a vast host from the east: the Khaqan of Chin, Manshur, Shangul and Kamus of Kashan (Kamus-e Koshani), a giant whom no one has seen defeated. On their bare rock, short of food, the Iranians hold on. Tus dreams of Siyavash on an ivory throne, telling him to stay where he is, for he will win. Kay Khosrow sends Rostam. Kamus fights Giv and Tus until nightfall, and then Rostam arrives.

The archer on foot

Next day a Turanian named Ashkabus rides out, and Rohham, after a long fight, turns his horse and retreats up the hill. Rostam stops Tus from going after him. He will fight on foot, he says. Ashkabus laughs and asks his name, and who will weep for his headless body. Rostam answers that his mother named him Your Death. Have you never seen a man fight on foot, he asks; do lions and leopards ride to battle in your country? Tus sent him on foot, he adds, to fetch Ashkabus's horse.

His first arrow kills the horse, and he tells the rider to sit by his noble comrade and nurse its head for a while. Ashkabus shoots arrow after arrow at him to no effect. Then Rostam chooses one poplar arrow with a point like water and four eagle feathers, and the poet slows down to watch: the left arm straight, the right arm bent, the bow of Chach groaning, the notch drawn back to his ear, the point kissing his fingertips. The arrow strikes Ashkabus in the chest and he dies on the spot. Fate cries take, destiny cries give, the heavens cry well done. The Khaqan sends a rider to pull the arrow from the body, and his army passes it from hand to hand, taking it for a spear.

Kamus

The next morning Kamus rides out with an ox-headed mace and calls for the man who fought on foot. No one moves until Alva, the Zaboli who carries Rostam's spear, goes against him, though Rostam warns him not to drown in the sea of his own skill. Kamus lifts him from the saddle with his lance and tramples him into the ground. Rostam comes on with lasso and mace. Kamus mocks his rope as a thread of sixty coils, and his sword cuts the armour on Rakhsh's neck but not the horse. Rostam's noose drops over him and Rakhsh pulls away. Kamus strains against the raw hide until he faints, and Rostam pulls him to the ground, ties his hands behind his back and walks him into the Iranian lines under his arm. Here, he tells the champions, is the man who came to leave no palace or rose garden standing in Zabol or Kabol: his helmet and mail are now his shroud. They cut him to pieces with their swords.

The Warners, the poem's English translators, thought that Kamus's Kashan was a town in Ferghana rather than the city in central Iran. They also retell a later legend that Ferdowsi composed the Ashkabus episode in a single day at Sultan Mahmud's court, and that the lines on the drawing of the bow so delighted the Sultan that he recited them again and again.