The death of Khosrow Parviz and of Shirin

Khosrow's long reign ends in revolt. The army frees his imprisoned son Shirui and hails him as king under the name Qobad. Khosrow hides in a garden, his golden shield hung on a branch. When he grows hungry he gives a gardener a piece cut from his jewelled belt to buy bread, and a jeweller knows it at once as the king's. Taken, Khosrow remembers what the astrologers once told him: he would die between two mountains, one of gold and one of silver, under a golden sky on iron ground. His golden shield is the sky, he says, his armour the ground, and his two treasuries the mountains.

Shirui sends him under guard to Tisfun and then sends envoys to list his crimes. Khosrow answers at great length, defending every act of his reign. In his prison he will eat only what Shirin brings him. Shirui weeps for his father, but he is afraid of the men who made him king, and they insist that two kings cannot sit in one palace.

They find a killer: a nameless stranger, blue-eyed, hairy and hungry, with dusty feet. Farrokhzad gives him a purse of gold and a dagger. When Khosrow sees him he trembles and asks his name. "They call me Mehr-Hormozd," the man says, "a stranger in this city, without friend or companion." Khosrow knows his time has come. He sends a boy for water, musk and clean clothes and for the barsom, the bundle of sacred twigs held in prayer, prays under his breath and repents of his sins, then draws a new cloth over his head so as not to see his murderer's face. Mehr-Hormozd bolts the door and stabs him in the side. Fifteen of his sons, held in the same palace prison, are killed after him.

Shirin

Fifty-three days later Shirui sends word to Shirin, calling her a sorceress and the guiltiest woman in Iran, and orders her to come to him. She replies that she will not look on a man who has shed his father's blood, has her will written, sews her own shroud and keeps a little poison with her. Summoned before Shirui and fifty of his elders, she sits behind the royal curtain and asks them what wrong they have ever seen in her. For years she was the first lady of Iran and did only right. She bore Khosrow four sons, Nastud, Shahriyar, Farud and Mardanshah, and all of them are dead.

Then she uncovers her face and lets them see her hair. "This is my sorcery," she says. No man has ever seen her face before. Shirui is overcome and asks her to marry him. She names her price: he must sign over to her, before the assembly, all the wealth she owns. He does. She goes home, frees her slaves, and gives her wealth to the poor and to her family, to the fire temples and to ruined inns, all in Khosrow's name. Then she tells her household that no one will see her face again.

Her last request is to open Khosrow's tomb. She lays her face against his, speaks of the past, and swallows the poison. She dies sitting beside him, veiled, in a single robe scented with camphor, her back against the wall. Shirui falls sick at the news. Not long afterwards he too is poisoned, after seven months on the throne.