One hears the clear, crisp clatter of the horse’s hoofs as they gallop through the epic. Docile as Rakush has become, his spirit is unbent; he is eager to fight his own battles and his master’s too. Like Baiardo, the horse in Ariosto, he uses his hoofs with deadly effect, and on one occasion there is a regular duel between him and another horse while Rustem is fighting its rider. His rashness inspires Rustem with much anxiety in their earlier journeys together. Quite at the beginning, when Rustem is on his way to liberate his captive king—his first “labour”—he lies down to sleep in a forest, leaving Rakush free to graze, and what is not his surprise when he wakes to find a large lion extended dead on the grass close by. Rakush killed the savage beast with teeth and heels while his master slept tranquilly. Rustem remonstrates with his too venturesome steed: Why did he fight the lion all alone? Why did he not neigh loudly and call for assistance? Had he reflected how terribly unfortunate it would be for Rustem if anything were to happen to him? Who would carry his heavy battle-axe and all his other accoutrements? He conjures Rakush to fight no more lions single-handed. Then and at other times Rustem talks to Rakush, but Rakush does not answer like the horse of Achilles. The Persians of the eleventh century had reached the stage of people who take their marvels with discrimination; they accepted Simurghs, white demons, phantom elks, giants, dragons, but they might have hesitated about a talking horse. Another of Rustem’s addresses to his horse was spoken after one of his first victories when the enemy was in full retreat: “My valued friend,” he said, “put forth thine utmost speed and bear me after the foe.” The noble animal certainly understood, for he bounded over the plain snorting as he flew along and tossing up his mane, and great was the booty which fell into his master’s hands. Rustem once said that with his arms and his trusty steed he would not mind fighting thirty thousand men. As a matter of fact, he never lacked followers, for he was of those captains who have only to stamp on the ground for there to spring up soldiers.
In the nineteenth century a “legendary hero” wandered with his horse over the plains of Uruguay much as Rustem wandered with Rakush. “In my nomad life in America,” writes Garibaldi, “after a long march or a day’s fighting, I unsaddled my poor tired horse and smoothed and dried his coat ... rarely could I offer him a handful of oats since those illimitable fields provide so little grain that oats are not often given to horses. Then, after leading him to water, I settled him for the night near my own resting-place. Well, when all this was done, which was no more than a duty to my faithful companion of toil and peril, I felt content, and if by chance he neighed, refreshed, or rolled on the green turf—oh, then I tasted la gentil voluttà d’esser pio!” Marvels are out of date, but feeling remains unchanged, and the “sweets of kindness” were known, surely, even to the earliest hero who made a friend of his horse and found him, in the solitude of the wild, no bad substitute for human friends.
In the story of Sohrab, one of the finest episodes in epic poetry, Rakush is introduced as the primary cause of it all. Tired with hunting in the forest, and perhaps inclined to sleep by a meal of roasted wild ass, which seems to have been his favourite game, Rustem lay down to rest under a tree, turning Rakush free to graze as was his wont. When he awoke the horse was nowhere to be seen! Rustem looked for his prints, a way of recovering stolen animals still practised with astonishing success in India. He found the prints and guessed that his favourite had been carried off by robbers, which was what had actually happened: a band of Tartar marauders lassoed the horse with their kamunds and dragged him home. Rustem followed the track over the border of the little state of Samengan, the king of which, warned of the approach of the hero of the age, went out to meet him on foot with great deference. The hero, however, was in no mood for compliments; full of wrath, he told the king that his horse had been stolen and that he had traced his footprints to Samengan. The king kept his presence of mind better than might have been expected; he made profuse excuses and declared that no effort should be spared to recover the horse—meanwhile he prayed Rustem to become his honoured guest.
Emissaries were sent in all directions in search of Rakush and a grand entertainment was prepared for his master. Pleased and placated, Rustem, who had spared little time for luxury in his adventurous life, finally lay down on a delightful and beautifully adorned bed. How poetic was sleep when it was associated, not with an erection on four legs, but with a low couch spread with costly furs and rich Eastern stuffs! So Rustem reposed, when his eyes opened on a living dream, a maiden standing by his side, her lovely features illuminated by a lamp which a slave girl held. “I am the daughter of the king,” says the fair vision; “no one man has ever seen my face or even heard my voice. I have heard of thy wondrous valour....” Rustem, still wondering if he slept or woke, asked her what was her will? She answered that she loved him for his fame and glory, and that she had vowed to God she would wed no other man. Behold, God has brought him to her! She desires him to ask her hand to-morrow of her father and so departs, lighted on her way by the little slave.
Was ever anything more chaste in its self-abandonment than the avowal of this love, holy as Desdemona’s and irresistible as Senta’s? Nowhere in fiction can be found a more convincing illustration of the truth that the essential spring of woman’s love for man is hero-worship. On which truth, in spite of the illusions it covers, what is best in human evolution is largely built.
The king gave glad assent to the marriage, which was celebrated according to the rites of that country. Rustem tarried but one night with his bride: in the morning with weeping eyes she watched him galloping away on the recovered Rakush. Long she grieved, and only when a son was born was her sad heart comforted. The grandfather gave the boy the name of Sohrab. Rustem had left an amulet to be placed in the hair if God gave her a daughter but bound round the arm if a son were born.
In due course Rustem sent a gift of costly jewels to his wife Tahmineh, with inquiries whether the birth of a child had blessed the marriage? And now the mother of Sohrab made the fatal mistake of a deception which led to all the evil that followed; she sent word that a girl had been born because she was afraid that if Rustem knew that he had a son, he would take him from her. Rustem, disappointed in his hopes, thought no more about Samengan.
There is no hint that Tahmineh’s fibbing, which, like very many other “white lies,” ended in dire disaster, was in the slightest degree the moral as well as the actual cause of the fatality. Herodotus said that every Persian child was taught to ride and to speak the truth; by Firdusi’s time the second part of the instruction seems to have been neglected, for in the Shah Nameh he makes everybody give full rein to his powers of invention without the slightest scruple. The bad consequences are attributed to blind fate, not to seeing Nemesis.
What is so agonising in the doom of Sohrab is precisely the lack of moral cause such as exists in the Greek tragedies. Though we do not accept as a reality the Greek theory of retribution, we do accept it as a point of view, and it helps us, as it helped them, to endure the unspeakable horror of the Ædipus story.
Sohrab goes forth, with a boy’s enthusiasm, to conquer Persia as a present to his unknown father. The two meet, and are incited to engage in single combat, each not knowing the other. After a Titanic contest, Sohrab falls fatally wounded, and only then does Rustem discover his identity. Matthew Arnold’s poem has familiarised English readers with this wonderful scene, and though the “atmosphere” with which he surrounded it, is rather classical than Eastern, his “Sohrab and Rustum” remains the finest rendering of an Eastern story in English poetry. Some blind guide blamed him for “plagiarising” Firdusi: in a few points he might have done wisely to follow his original still more closely; at least, it is a pity that he did not enshrine in his own beautiful poem Sohrab’s touching words of comfort to his distracted father: “None is immortal—why this grief?” Brave, spotless, kind, Firdusi’s hero-victim who “came as the lightning and went as the wind” will always rank with the highest in the House of the Youthful Dead.