Khosrow and Shirin

Before he was king, while his father still lived, Khosrow Parviz loved Shirin. She was as dear to him as his own eyes, and he wanted no other woman, whether a beauty or a great man's daughter. Then came the throne and the long war with Bahram Chubin, and for a time he left her. Shirin wept day and night.

One day Khosrow rides out to hunt with all the splendour of the old kings: three hundred horses with golden trappings, falconers and leopard-keepers, lions on golden chains, hounds, minstrels riding camels, boys carrying saffron and narcissus so that scent will meet him on every side, and water-carriers to lay the dust before him. Shirin hears that he is coming. She puts on a yellow tunic and a red robe of Rumi brocade, sets a crown on her head and goes up on to the roof. When he comes into sight she rises to her full height and, in tears, speaks to him in Pahlavi of the old days. Where is that love now, she asks, where the days we turned into nights, where our bonds and our oaths?

Khosrow weeps too. He sends forty Rumi eunuchs with a horse to bring her to his golden women's palace, finishes his hunt, and on his return asks the high priest to give her to him in marriage by the ancient rite.

The city is troubled. For three days no noble comes to court. When at last Khosrow summons them, they say nothing, and the high priest speaks for all: a royal line is spoiled when the mother is unworthy, and a great demon has become the king's companion. Khosrow does not answer. The next day a man brings a basin of warm blood before the assembly and sets it down beside the king. Everyone turns away. "Whose blood is this?" Khosrow asks. Unclean blood, says the priest, that defiles anyone who looks at it. The king has the basin emptied, scoured with water and earth and filled with wine, musk and rose water, until it shines like the sun.

Shirin, he tells them, was like that basin of poison while she lived in the city. In his palace she is a basin of wine. Her bad name began with him; she never sought the company of great men. The nobles bless him.

Shirin's place is secure, but not settled. Khosrow spends his days with Caesar's daughter Maryam, the first among his women, and Shirin grows pale with jealousy until at last she poisons her. No one knows, for Shirin keeps the secret to herself, and a year after Maryam's death Khosrow gives Shirin the golden women's palace. Maryam's son Shirui grows up under bad omens, and Khosrow keeps him confined. That son will bring about the deaths of his father and of Shirin.

Ferdowsi's Shirin belongs to a short episode in a long reign. The romance most Persian readers know, with Shirin as an Armenian princess and the stonecutter Farhad who digs through a mountain for her, comes from Nezami's Khosrow and Shirin, written almost two centuries later.