The death of Yazdegerd at Merv

After Qadisiyyah, Yazdegerd decides to go east to Khorasan, where he hopes for help from the marchlords and the Turks. He writes to Mahuy Suri, the governor of Merv, a man of shepherd stock whom the royal house has raised high. At the border of Tus, Mahuy rides out to meet him, dismounts, walks on the hot dust and kisses the ground. Farrokhzad, son of Hormozd, who has guarded the king so far, leaves him in Mahuy's keeping and goes to Rey.

Soon the shepherd wants the throne. Mahuy pretends to be ill, and writes to Bizhan, a Turkish lord who rules from Samarkand: the king is at Merv with no army, come and take him. Bizhan sends his commander Barsam with ten thousand horsemen. They attack at cock-crow. Yazdegerd puts on his armour and charges, and finds that no one has followed him; Mahuy's men have turned their backs. He fights alone, then flees with his Kabul sword in his hand, leaves his horse and weapons, and hides in a mill on the water of Zarq.

At sunrise the miller, a poor man named Khosrow, comes in with a load of grass on his back and finds a tall stranger sitting on the hay, with a crown on his head, golden shoes and sleeves sewn with pearls. "I am an Iranian," the king tells him, "in flight from the army of Turan." The miller has only barley bread and cress from the river bank to offer. Yazdegerd, who has not eaten for three days, asks for that, and for the barsom, the sacred twigs held in the prayer before a meal.

The miller goes to the headman of Zarq to ask for barsom. Mahuy's riders are already searching everywhere, and the headman wants to know who it is for. The miller describes the stranger and is taken to Mahuy, who knows at once who it must be. "Go and cut off his head," Mahuy tells him, "or I will cut off yours and leave none of your family alive." His priests and nobles beg him to stop: kingship and prophecy, says the priest Radui, are two jewels set in one ring. Mahuy's son urges him on.

The miller goes back at night, weeping, and praying that God will punish Mahuy for the order. He comes close to the king as if to whisper in his ear, and stabs him in the side. The king's crown and the barley bread fall together in the dust. Mahuy's riders strip the body and throw it into the river. In the morning monks from a nearby monastery find it, carry it out of the water and build the king a tomb in their garden, mourning the last descendant of Ardashir.

Mahuy kills the builders of the tomb, takes the throne with the dead king's ring, and marches on Bizhan. He is captured, his hands and feet are cut off, and he is burned with his three sons.

The end of the book

There the poem ends. In its last lines Ferdowsi speaks for himself. He was sixty-five when he began to worry about finishing, and now he is seventy-one. Many praised the work but few paid for it; he thanks two men who helped him, Ali Deylami and Hoseyn son of Qotayb, and praises Sultan Mahmud. He dates the end of the story of Yazdegerd to the day Ard of the month Esfand, in the year 400 of the Hijra. "I shall not die from now on, for I live," he writes. "I have scattered the seed of words."