INTERLUDE
Once there was, and how much there was. In the land of Tus there was a young boy named Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi was an adventurous child, loving to play outside in the wind and green. His favorite place was the howling Tus River, a great surging river continuing forever in both directions, as wide as ten houses. Ferdowsi would spend hours and hours watching wood and whitecaps drift down, listening to the river gurgle and groan. Sometimes he would very carefully dip a foot, a hand into the river till he couldn’t feel it anymore, couldn’t tell where he ended and the river began. Some days he would write small poems for the river, reading them to nobody but the river itself.
One day he walked to the river to find the water had swallowed the ancient stone bridge connecting the two sides. Families were tearfully shouting across the great divide—brothers to brothers, young women to their parents. They knew their families would now be separated forever. Seeing this, Ferdowsi shouted, “My people, I will build us a new bridge, stronger than the last one! A bridge that will never disappear! No rain, no wind will destroy it.”
The rope-maker said, “Ferdowsi, you are a child, not an elder. You don’t have the knowledge to build a new bridge.”
The jewelry merchant, said, “Ferdowsi, you are a poor boy, not a prince. You don’t have the money to build a new bridge.”
Finally, the carpenter cried out, “Ferdowsi, you spend all your time daydreaming and writing silly poems. You don’t have the discipline to build a new bridge.”
But Ferdowsi was determined. He ran away from the river and back to his home and left the rope-maker, the jewelry merchant, the carpenter, and all the other villagers to their wailing. Over the next many years, the villagers seldom saw him. Ferdowsi’s mother and father provided food and water for him far past the age he should have been providing food and water for them. He grew into a man this way, hidden away from everyone but his family. Occasionally, some farmer would report they’d seen him wandering around at night, muttering to himself.
After many such quiet years, one spring afternoon Ferdowsi finally went out from his parents’ house and into the center of his village.
“I have written a poem for the king!” he announced. “It is the greatest poem Tus has ever produced!”
The few villagers who heard hardly looked up. The sun was high in the air. A little girl chased a chicken.
Undeterred, Ferdowsi prepared for his next step: the long journey to the king’s palace. He set off alone and arrived at the palace weeks later, exhausted and barely able to hold his own weight.
“Who are you?” the king’s courtier asked when Ferdowsi arrived.
“I am Ferdowsi, the greatest poet in Tus,” he replied. “I have written a poem for King Mahmud.”
The young man’s boldness amused the courtier, so he brought him inside the castle to meet King Mahmud.
“Who are you?” asked the sleepy young king Mahmud from his throne.
“I am Ferdowsi, the greatest poet in Tus,” he answered. “I have written you a poem.”
“Go ahead then,” said King Mahmud, only mildly interested. But as Ferdowsi read his poem, each of the twenty couplets was flawless, like a string of perfect pearls. The king’s great eyes began to twinkle.
“Ferdowsi,” said the king when the poem was complete, “that is the most brilliant poem I have ever heard. Truly, you are the greatest poet in Tus.”
“Thank you, my king,” said Ferdowsi.
“I would like you to write the great poem of our people,” continued King Mahmud. “Tell the history of all Persia. You can live here at the castle. I will feed you the richest meats, clothe you in the finest silks.”
Ferdowsi said, “You are very generous, my king. But I do not need rich meats or fine silks to write poetry. I just need my family’s house in Tus, and our wild river. I would like to write this poem for you. But I will write it in my own home, with my own family.”
“Well then, how shall I compensate you for your verse?” asked King Mahmud.
“How about this,” Ferdowsi said, smiling, “I will write your poem, and you can pay me one gold coin for every couplet. And you do not need to pay me until I finish the poem.”
King Mahmud thought to himself. What little sense poets had! The silks and fine cuisines of his palace were worth far more than a couple dozen gold coins.
“Very well, poet!” said the king, smiling. “You have a deal!”
The courtier drew up a contract and, when it was signed, the king sent Ferdowsi back to Tus in a comfortable caravan.
For months, then years, Ferdowsi wrote and wrote. Sometimes, villagers would gather outside his family’s house and beg him to come to the window to read to them from his poem. Sometimes, he would, and then the villagers of Tus would gasp, cry out, weep. This is how he met his wife Sara, with whom he had two children, Sohrab and Tahmina. His children would grow and become adults themselves, but every day was the same: their father would write, write, stroll down to the river once each night, and then return to the house and write some more.
Sometimes, King Mahmud, who was getting older and older, would send his courtier to Tus to find Ferdowsi and demand the poem. But Ferdowsi would always just say, simply, “You cannot rush poetry. There was no deadline in the contract.”
One day Ferdowsi’s son Sohrab drowned in a tragic accident on the river. A storm, a collapse. Though Ferdowsi’s grief was unimaginable, his habits did not change. Every day he woke up and wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
Finally, after four long and sad decades, Ferdowsi sent notice to King Mahmud that his poem was finished. They had both been young men when Ferdowsi began the poem; now their faces were cracked and deep with wrinkles. They each had children and grandchildren of their own. Ferdowsi called his poem Shahnehmeh, “The Book of Kings.” He filled it with ancient histories of Persia’s kings and heroes, epic battles and romances, fantastical magic and treacherous deceits. He also put his son, Sohrab, in it. Ferdowsi’s love for his lost son colored the whole text, like deep wine spilled across its pages.
When the courtier presented the poem to King Mahmud, the king was furious.
“Forty years?! That is unreasonable. We are old men now. And look at this massive poem! It must be ten thousand couplets!”
It had taken four strong camels to carry the whole poem to the palace.
“Fifty thousand, sir,” said the courtier. He’d been up the whole night before counting them.
“What did you say?”
“The poem, sir. It’s exactly fifty thousand couplets.”
The king was livid.
“Ferdowsi will receive his payment,” he said. “Send him his fifty thousand coins. Copper coins.”
The courtier nodded and had the servants ready the camels.
When the king’s servants arrived in Tus two weeks later with a caravan of copper, Ferdowsi could only laugh.
“Friends,” he said to the servants, “take this copper and begin your new lives far away from traitorous King Mahmud.”
The servants looked at each other and happily took the copper, eager to start fresh far away from the palace.
Ferdowsi’s daughter Tahmina looked at him, asked, “Why did you give away all that copper?”
Ferdowsi said, “That much copper cannot pay for a good bridge, but it can buy those men a little land, a few goats.”
When the king’s servants did not return to the castle, Mahmud was even more furious. He cursed all poets and forbade poetry from being uttered in his presence.
But one year later, a short message arrived at the palace. It was a poem, a curse, from Ferdowsi.
“Yes, read it!” the king demanded to his courtier.
Cautiously, the courtier did. When he got to the final lines,
Heaven’s vengeance will not forget.
Shrink, tyrant, from my fire,
and tremble,
King Mahmud was scared. He did not want to show it, but he was. Terrified, even. He went back to Ferdowsi’s untouched manuscript from the year before, which was gathering dust in a back room of the palace. As the king read Ferdowsi’s lines, he began to weep.
“O! I have made a grievous error,” he cried out. Summoning his courtier, he said, “Courtier! O! Ferdowsi has produced the greatest poem in the history of all of Persia. We have been fools. Send him his gold coins at once, and with interest.”
The courtier loaded up the camels with gold and set off for Tus, this time traveling himself with the caravan.
After nearly two weeks’ journey, the courtier’s caravan came up upon another great caravan, much longer than his own, a caravan filled with agile dancers, musicians singing ballads.
The courtier addressed the head of the caravan,
“I am courtier for King Mahmud! I am traveling to Tus to find the great poet Ferdowsi, to deliver him his life’s payment of gold.”
A circle of people began to form around the courtier.
“You will not find Ferdowsi in Tus,” said the woman at the head of the caravan.
“Where has he gone?” asked the courtier.
“Ferdowsi is dead,” she replied. “This is his funeral caravan.”
The courtier saw that all the people circled around him were all in mourning robes.
“O! The greatest poet in Tus has died?! The greatest poet in all of Persia! Curse our pride, and our folly.” The courtier collapsed upon his knees.
The woman at the head of the caravan stepped forward:
“I am Tahmina, daughter of Ferdowsi, the greatest poet in Tus. I will take my father’s payment and use it for the construction of the finest bridge in all of Persia.”
The courtier swiftly nodded.
When the courtier returned to the palace and told the king what happened, the king sent his best royal engineers to Tus. They helped Tahmina and the villagers with the construction of “The Poet’s Bridge,” a great bridge built so strong it still stands today.