The birth of Rostam

Not long after the wedding Rudabeh is with child, and the pregnancy goes badly. Her cheeks turn from cercis-pink to saffron. She tells her mother that her body feels stuffed with stones or iron. As her time approaches she cannot sleep, and one day she faints. Cries go up through Zal's palace, and Sindokht tears her hair.

Zal comes to the bedside in tears. Then he remembers the Simorgh's feather. He smiles, tells Sindokht to take heart, lights a fire in a censer and burns a little of the feather. The sky darkens and the great bird comes down. Why, she asks, are there tears in a lion's eyes? From this silver cypress will come a lion-hearted son, at whose voice the leopard will tear its own hide. But he will not be born the natural way.

She tells Zal exactly what to do. Bring a steel dagger and a skilled man. Make the mother drunk with wine so that she feels no fear or pain. Let him open her side, draw out the lion's whelp and sew up the wound. Pound a herb she names with milk and musk, dry it in the shade and spread it on the cut, then stroke it with one of her feathers. She drops a feather from her wing and flies away.

A mobed (priest) with a steady hand does it all. Sindokht weeps blood, asking how a child can come out through the side, but the boy is delivered unharmed and already the size of a lion cub. No one has seen such a thing. Rudabeh sleeps for a day and a night. When she wakes and sees him she laughs and says rastam, 'I am delivered, my grief is over', and so they name him Rostam.

A silk Rostam for Sam

Sam is away at war, so they send him a likeness: a doll the size of the baby, sewn from silk and stuffed with sable fur, the sun and Venus painted on its cheeks, a dragon on its arm and a lion's claws in its hand, with a spear, a mace and reins, seated on a horse. From Zabolestan to Kabul there is feasting. At the sight of it Sam's hair stands on end: 'If he is half this size, his head will touch the clouds.'

Ten nurses feed the child. Once weaned, he eats as much as five men, and he soon stands as tall as a cypress. When Sam comes to see him, Rostam rides out on a war elephant, on a golden throne, crowned, with a shield before him and a mace in his hand. He kisses his grandfather's throne and greets him in a new way: he is Sam's branch and Sam is his root, and he wants no feasting or sleep, only a saddle, mail and a helmet. Sam marvels at him through a month of feasting. Mehrab, drunk, boasts that with Rostam beside him he fears neither Zal nor Sam nor the king, and will bring back the ways of Zahhak, and Zal and Sam laugh. When Sam leaves for the west he tells Zal to be just and loyal to his kings, and says he feels his own time is near.

Older printed editions of the poem, which the Warners translated, add two boyhood exploits here: Rostam kills Zal's maddened white elephant with one blow of Sam's mace, and then, disguised as a salt merchant, takes the fortress on Mount Sepand to avenge his ancestor Nariman. The text used here, Ganjoor's, does not include them, and editors have generally treated them as later additions.