And glancing behind them, at the slight rise where their king had stationed himself, as every Shahanshah did prior to a battle, they saw the ultimate reassurance of this. Now, more than ever, Peroz aimed to pose as a figure of epic. Great care had been taken to ensure that his horse was the tallest and most handsome around. Attendants stood poised by the royal mount, to ensure that it would not whinny, nor urinate, nor in any other way lower the heroic tone. The king himself, as ever, was positively ablaze with sumptuous jewellery. Meanwhile, planted behind him, where it could be seen by everyone in the ranks, there fluttered his massive standard: the Derafsh Kaviani, or “Flag of Kava.” An expression of Sasanian power, it was also authentically, and heroically, pan-Iranian. It was no coincidence, for instance, that its name bore witness to the fabled ancestor of the Karin: for once, prior to its adornment with jewels and tassels, it had been a humble leather apron, worn, so it was said, by the demon-slaying blacksmith himself. Now, as Peroz gave the order for his cavalry to advance, it was his aim to emulate the feat of Kava: for he was looking to rout a whole army of demons.
Lumbering forwards, trotting at first, then breaking into a thunderous gallop, the heavily armoured cavalrymen aimed their lances at the more lightly armed Hephthalites. Through the dust clouds kicked up by their horses, it appeared that the enemy was clumping together in a disorganised panic. Then the Hephthalites broke, turned and streamed back across the dead centre of the plain. Raising a cry of triumph, the Persian cavalry immediately fanned out, aiming to encircle their retreating foes. They charged ever faster; the dust rose ever thicker. Arrows, hissing down through the clouds of grit, began to rattle and bounce off their armour; but the men of Iranshahr disdained so much as to flinch. From head to foot, their iron cladding was “proof against any missiles, and a sure defence against all wounds.”24 The arrows of contemptible nomads could do them no harm. They were, to all intents and purposes, invulnerable. Victory, surely, was theirs.
Then, suddenly, they felt their horses’ hooves give way and begin to paw the air. The riders themselves flew forwards and found themselves dropping, through a nightmarish haze of dust and arrows, into the bowels of a massive ditch. Too late, the front ranks of the Persian cavalry realised that the Hephthalites had prepared for their attack with fiendish cunning. They had excavated a great trench, dug across most of the plain, which they had then covered with a thin layer of reeds and earth. They had left only the centre intact, to facilitate their own retreat; meanwhile, the pursuing Persians had blundered directly into the death-trap. “And such was the spirit of fury with which they had launched their pursuit of the enemy that those to the rear of the vanguard failed to notice the catastrophe which had overwhelmed those in the front rank. And so with horse and lance they continued to ride into the trench, and to trample down their own fellows, so that all were destroyed. And among the dead was Peroz himself.”25
As to how precisely the Shahanshah had met his end, various accounts were given. Some said that as he crashed into the Hephthalite trench, he had torn off his own ear, and kept it clenched in his palm: for he had not wanted some savage nomad to lay claim to his famous pearl. Others said that he was left trapped in a cleft in the ground, where he died of hunger; and others yet that he had crawled away from the killing field, “only to be devoured by wild animals.”26
Two things were certain, though. First, neither Peroz’s body nor his great pearl was ever found; second, his farr had abandoned him for good.
Fire Starter
Only a few weary and grime-streaked Persian survivors managed to stumble back from the killing fields of Gurgan. The news that they brought with them could hardly have had more menacing implications. The gore that had filled the Hephthalite trenches might as well have been the lifeblood of Iranshahr itself. No realm in the world could endure for long without treasure or men—and the slaughter had left the Sasanian Empire drained of both. Only a massive effort on the part of the imperial tax-collectors had enabled the expedition to ride out in the first place; now, with the flower of the empire’s cavalry destroyed, there was nothing left to blunt the scythings of the Hephthalites’ own horsemen. The frontier stood wide open. All the bulwarks that Peroz had laboured so hard to construct lay abandoned and tenantless. Whisperings of terror, thickening into ever more certain rumour, were soon darkening the eastern dominions of Iranshahr: of whole regions, where once the Kayanids had ruled, turned by the Hephthalites to shambles of blood and ash.27
Here, in the picking to the bone of the ancient heartlands of the Aryan people, was a fearsome challenge to the practical functioning of the entire Sasanian realm. Both its prestige and its tax base were under mortal threat. But this was not the worst. The Hephthalite flames were scorching more than fields and cities. The conflagration was also consuming structures regarded by those who had raised them as sources of a truly awesome holiness. Just as fire, in the hands of the wicked, might be used to destroy, so also, in the hands of the virtuous, might it be consecrated to the service of the heavens. This was why, studded across Iranshahr, there were temples that contained no statues but rather, in each one, “an altar in the middle of an enclosure, holding a large quantity of ashes, where priests keep a fire eternally burning.”28 Desecrate such an altar, so it was believed, and the order of the cosmos itself would start to totter. In the aftermath of Peroz’s “overpowering and crushing defeat,”29 as fire temples across the northern reaches of Parthia were sent crashing into ruin by the Hephthalites, there were many in Iranshahr who saw in the annihilation of the royal army something far more troubling, and portentous, than a mere military debacle: a darkening of the universe itself.
Yet, hope remained. The three holiest fire temples—the most luminescent and charged with power—remained inviolate. One, the “Fire of the Stallion,” was enclosed within rings of towering fortifications on the summit of a hill in Media, the mountainous region that lay to the north of Persia; the second, the “Fire of the Farr,” stood secure within Persia itself. Only the third, the Adur Burzen-Mihr—“Fire of Mihr is Great”—seemed at potential risk from the Hephthalites: for it lay close to the front line, in Parthia, on the ancient highway that led directly to the steppelands of the north.30 To the devout of Iranshahr, however, the notion that one of their three most sacred fire temples might be despoiled, its ashes scattered, its flame extinguished, appeared almost sacrilegious in itself. To imagine such a thing was to contemplate a cosmos terminally sick.
No mortal hand had brought the three great fires into being. Rather, the Good God, Ohrmazd—the Eternal, the All-Radiant, the Supremely Wise—had lit them, “like three lights, for the watching of the world.”31 And the world had urgently needed watching. Ohrmazd, the fountainhead of all that was good and pure and right, was not the only creator god. “Truly,” ran an ancient verse, “there are two primal Spirits, twins, renowned for being in conflict. In thought and word and deed, they are two: the best and the worst.”32 While Ohrmazd had brought Asha—“Truth and Order”—to the universe, his shadow, Ahriman, snake-haired and darkness-vomiting, had spawned their opposite: Drug—“the Lie.” The cohorts of evil were everywhere. They ranged from nomads, such as the Hephthalites, to that most fiendish and wicked of all Ahriman’s creations, the frog. In the ongoing struggle against such adversaries, mortals choosing the path of righteousness and light had long cherished the assistance that Ohrmazd sent them. Back in primordial times, the great fires had swept across the face of the earth, going wherever they were needed: one had helped in the overthrow of Dahag, the serpent-shouldered necromancer; another had assisted a Kayanid king in a particularly arduous bout of idol-smashing. Stationary though the fires had since become, they had lost not a spark of their heavenly potency. They remained what they had always been: the surest guardians of the proper ordering of the world.