Chess comes from India, and nard goes back

As Anushirvan holds court one day, word comes that an envoy of the king of Hind has arrived with elephants, parasols, riders from Sind and a thousand camel-loads of gifts. With the gold, musk and Indian swords comes a chessboard, made with great labour, and a message from the Raja (in Persian, the Rai) of Kannauj. Let the wise men of Iran work out how this game is played, the name of each piece and its square. If they succeed, he will send tribute. If they fail, Iran must stop asking for tribute and pay it instead, since knowledge is worth more than wealth.

Half the pieces are ivory and half teak. Asked what they mean, the envoy says only that everything in the game belongs to the art of war. The king asks for a week. His priests and counsellors try every arrangement and leave scowling. Then Bozorgmehr comes forward. He takes the board home, sits over it for a day and a night, and finds the game. Back at court he sets out a battle: the king in the centre, his counsellor beside him, cavalry on the wings, foot soldiers with spears in front, the elephants and war-horses and the champions on their flanks. The envoy is astonished. This man has never seen a chessboard, he thinks, nor heard of one from the sages of Hind.

Nard in return

Bozorgmehr does not stop there. Alone with a board and compasses, he invents a game of his own, nard (backgammon): two ivory dice, a square field, two kings and their armies who move by turns until one side is beaten. Anushirvan loads two thousand camels with goods and sends Bozorgmehr to Kannauj with nard and the same terms. For a week the Raja's sages try and fail. On the ninth day Bozorgmehr lays out the board and explains every move, and the Raja sends him home with two thousand camel-loads of tribute and a letter saying that no one has seen a king like Anushirvan, or a wiser minister.

How chess began

Ferdowsi then tells a second story, which he gives to an old sage named Shahui. A king of Hind, Jamhur, dies leaving an infant son, Gav. The nobles give the throne to the dead king's brother Mai, who marries the widow and has a son by her, Talhand. When Mai dies too, the queen rules for both boys. They grow up rivals, each asking their mother which of them is fitter to rule, and at last they go to war.

Gav proposes a strange battlefield beside the sea, the two armies shut in by a trench filled with sea water, so that the beaten side cannot escape and can be taken prisoner rather than killed. In the fighting Talhand, high on his elephant, is caught between wind, sun and swords, with no water and no way out. He dies on his golden saddle without a wound. Gav weeps over him, but their mother will not believe that he did not kill his brother. She sets fire to Talhand's palace and builds a pyre for herself.

To show her how Talhand died, Gav's sages carve a square board of a hundred squares from ebony, with two armies of teak and ivory: kings, counsellors, elephants, camels, horses, champions and foot soldiers, each with its own move. When a piece threatens the king, its player calls out to him to turn aside, and the king moves until he is hemmed in on every side and can only die, shah mat. The mother sits over the board day and night, weeping for Talhand, with chess as the only medicine for her grief, until her own life ends.