And it was the ambition of this Zoroastrian Church, a prodigious and a dazzling one, to institute an order that might be truly universaclass="underline" reaching backwards as well as forwards through time. It was not chaos, after all, but deception that most menaced the universe—which meant in turn that it was vital, fearsomely and urgently vital, to establish the precise truth about the life and times of Zoroaster. Yet this presented a problem. The age of the great prophet was dizzyingly remote. So remote, in fact, that the long dead language in which he had made known his revelations, although lovingly preserved upon the tongues of the learned, had descended down the ages without so much as a script. This, to the fretful leaders of the Zoroastrian Church, had become a cause of mounting anxiety. Could memory truly provide a sufficient bulwark against the corrosive effects of time? If not, then the faithful, and the whole world, were surely damned. A script was duly devised.38 Zoroaster’s revelations were entrusted, for the first time ever, to a book.
But the priests were not done with their labours yet. The process of transcribing the mathra—the word of God—had begged a couple of obvious questions: where and when had Zoroaster received it? Here were riddles not easily solved. There was barely a region in Iranshahr that had not, at some point, laid claim to the honour of having been the birthplace of the Prophet. Embarrassingly, the most ancient reports of all—dating from a time when the Persians’ ancestors had themselves been nomads, living on the steppes—placed it fair and square in what was now the realm of the Hephthalites. It is impossible to know if the leaders of the Zoroastrian Church were aware of this tradition; either way, it was literally beyond the pale. Instead, with a gathering confidence and assertiveness, the mowbeds promoted a very different biography of their prophet. Zoroaster, they taught, had actually been born in Media around a thousand years previously, in the age of the Kayanids.a In fact, it was a Kayanid king, “mighty-speared and lordly,” who had offered him asylum in the wake of his exile and had served his nascent religion as its “arm and support.”39 A veritable model of royal behaviour, in other words. Peroz, desperate for his own good reasons to identify himself with the Kayanids, had duly taken the bait. Riding to war, he had done so not merely as the heir of the dynasty as a whole, but also, and more specifically, as the heir of the Prophet’s first patron. Church and state: twins indeed. Priest and king: both, it had seemed, were winners.
Except, unfortunately, that Peroz had ended up dead. A calamity, his subjects fretted, that had reflected more than simple bad luck. “No one was the cause of such losses and destruction save the divine lord of the Aryans himself.”40 This verdict, whispered increasingly across the entire span of Iranshahr, threatened to cripple the future of the House of Sasan. Critics condemned more than merely the royal battle tactics. Advancing towards the Gurgan Plain, the Shahanshah had passed the snow-capped Alburz Mountains: seat of a god named Mihr, whom it had always been peculiarly foolish to anger. The Zoroastrian priesthood ranked him—alongside Anahita—as one of the two foremost lieutenants of Ohrmazd: “sleepless and ever awake, the warrior of the white horse, he who maintains and looks over all this moving world.”41 And in particular, what Mihr kept watch for was oath-breakers: those who presumed to tell lies. Possessed as he was of “a thousand ears,”42 he was well equipped for the task. The god would certainly have tracked Peroz’s original expedition against the Hephthalites, when the Shahanshah, ambushed and taken captive, had been obliged to bow before the boots of the khan: for Peroz had craftily timed his obeisance to coincide with the sunrise, a moment when it was required of the faithful to offer up their prayers. Even more underhand, however, had been his scorning of the treaty forced upon him by the Hephthalites; for by its terms, he had sworn with great solemnity never again to cross the frontier. An oath which, of course, he had indisputably broken. What had the destruction of Peroz and his army been, then, if not the judgement of the wrathful heavens? “For you bring down terror upon those who lie, O Mihr. You take away the strength of their arms. You take away the swiftness of their feet.”43
The King of Kings was either the defender of Truth, or he was nothing. The miseries that had overwhelmed Iranshahr in the wake of Peroz’s death certainly appeared to confirm the whispered notion that the House of Sasan had become agents of the Lie. Impoverishment and brutalisation were not the only spectres to haunt the realm: renewed drought compounded the miseries inflicted by the Hephthalites. As the grip of famine tightened, and the starving scrabbled after roots and withered grass amid the dust of their barren fields, ever more people started to believe that the heavenly judge was delivering his verdict on Peroz: “The villain who breaks his promise to Mihr brings death upon all the land.”44 With “the Persian treasury empty and the land ravaged by the Huns,”45 the farr of Peroz’s heirs was barely glimmering. Over the course of the four years that followed the disaster of Gurgan, one of his brothers was executed as a pretender to the throne, and another was deposed and blinded. Peroz’s eldest son Kavad, who acceded to the throne on the back of this coup, was only just fifteen—the age at which, according to elite Persian custom, a boy was awarded a studded belt and became a man.46 His rule could scarcely have begun in less propitious circumstances.
As to the full scale of the challenges confronting him, that could best be gauged, perhaps, by staring into the sightless eyes of his uncle. Menace was building at home as well as abroad. Not everyone in Iranshahr had been left impoverished by Peroz’s defeat. To the great lords of Parthia, in particular, the calamities overwhelming the Persian monarchy had presented opportunity as well as peril. By the time that Kavad acceded to the throne, one of them had already moved with such boldness and swagger as to establish himself as king in all but name. Even by the standards of his forefathers, Sukhra, the head of the Karin, was quite fabulously domineering. He had also, uniquely, enjoyed an excellent war. It was under his command that the few demoralised remnants of the imperial army had managed to escape from the Gurgan front: an achievement so assiduously trumpeted that Sukhra had even presumed to cast himself as “the avenger of Peroz.”47 Amid the otherwise all-prevailing gloom, he possessed an undeniable aura of success—and exploited it to the hilt. He diverted taxes from the royal coffers into his own; he kept the warriors he had led back from Gurgan firmly under his own command. Kavad, “Lord of the Aryans” though he might be, appeared left with little save for impotence.