Between the Persian monarchy and the lords of Parthia, between the House of Sasan and the dynasties of the Karin and the Mihran, ghosts had always intruded. When Sukhra, in the pomp and glory of his magnificence, rode out beneath the great horseshoe arches of his palace, he did so at the head of warriors who seemed more like phantoms than men, conjured up from an age remoter by far than that of Ardashir, remoter even than that of Zoroaster himself. Their cloaks, their pennants, the livery of their chargers: all were green.48 The colour was that of Mihr—the god whose anger with Peroz had turned the fields of Iranshahr brown. The god, if he could only be appeased, had the power to make the soil fertile and giving again. Sukhra, by invoking this conviction with such flamboyance, was not only thumbing his nose at the House of Sasan but laying claim to the most ancient and enduring of the traditions cherished by the Parthians. Not for nothing was their sacred fire named the “Fire of Mihr is Great”: for in the easternmost regions of Iranshahr, Mihr was worshipped as he had once been by all the Aryan people, with a peculiarly single-hearted devotion. So much so, in fact, that the fervour with which the god’s cult was practised across the plains and mountains of Parthia tended to leave little time for Ohrmazd Himself.49 Just as Sukhra’s green-clad private army evoked a time before the Sasanians, so, even more scandalously, did the sacred fire of Mihr serve as a reminder of beliefs that pre-dated Zoroaster. Unsurprisingly, then, the mowbeds had done all they could to dim its renown. Too venerable to be extinguished entirely, it had nevertheless been demoted. Mihr’s fire, so the mowbeds had declared, was fit only for the masses: herdsmen, ploughmen, peasants. A doubly neat manoeuvre: for with it, the priests had served to cast the two remaining sacred fires—both of which lay securely within the Church’s own heartlands—as the only two with authentic pedigree. That the truth was far different—that the fire temple in Persia dated back only to the time of Ardashir, and the fire in Media even later, only to the reign of Peroz himself—had ceased so much as to register.50 It was the mowbeds, after all, who enjoyed the ear of the king, who commanded the resources of a spreading Church, who wrote the books. Yet still, wherever the Karin rode, their green-clad horsemen were sure to follow: serving notice that there were beliefs older than the Prophet, and still very far from dead.
Not that everyone in Parthia was necessarily convinced by Sukhra’s posing as the agent of Mihr. While the Parthian dynasts had long resented Persian rule, they were far more suspicious of each other than they were of the Sasanians. Kavad, in this fractiousness, was able to distinguish a glimmering of hope. It was not only the Shahanshah who was affronted by the suffocating greatness of the Karin. So too was the Parthian dynasty which, decades earlier, had helped Peroz to the throne, and still regarded it as their god-given right to throw their weight around much as they pleased: the Mihran. They too, as their name suggested, regarded themselves as the favourites of Mihr; they too raised their own taxes; they too had private armies. Kavad, growing up into a full recognition of his weakness, decided that he had no choice but to turn to them for assistance. A desperate throw, and one that did little for the royal prestige, of course—but the “Lord of the Aryans” was beyond caring. To all the other miseries afflicting his people Kavad now added, as the consequence of his manoeuvre, civil war. The Mihran, wooed into making an open assault on their bitterest rivals, duly advanced against the power of Sukhra. Reaches of Iranshahr left untorched by the Hephthalites were now trampled down by the empire’s two foremost noble families. Finally, in a climactic confrontation, it was the Karin who were overthrown. Sukhra was taken captive, and all his treasure with him. Delivered into royal hands, the great warlord was put to death.
None of which, as it turned out, improved the position of Kavad one jot. “Sukhra’s wind has died away, and a wind belonging to Mihran has now started to blow”:51 centuries later, and the phrase was still proverbial. Bitterly as the gusts must have sounded in the king’s ear, however, they did not sound so cruelly as they did across the blackened fields, the weed-choked roads, and the abandoned villages of his unhappy realm. War and famine were emptying the countryside. Even in the best of times, those who worked on the land had laboured under crushing burdens. All the wealth of the Shahanshah in his many fabulous palaces, of the dynasts in their own strongholds, and of the mowbeds on their fine horses, all the splendour of the aristocracy’s shimmering silks, their jewels and their groaning tables, all their dancing girls, their musicians and their performing monkeys, almost everything enjoyed by the rich, in short, had been wrung from the exertions of the poor. Unsurprisingly, then, the flight of peasants from the fields had long been a cause of anxiety to the elite; and vagrants, if they were caught, could expect to be branded on their faces as rebels against Ohrmazd Himself. Increasingly, though, as misery was piled upon misery, the sheer number of people on the move started to overwhelm the authorities. Many rootless peasants headed for the cities, but many more, ganging together and brandishing cudgels and bill-hooks, took to the road and turned predator themselves. At first, they plundered their neighbours’ villages and attacked travellers on the highways. Then, as they grew in number and confidence, they started to aim higher. Barely believable news began to intrude upon the councils of the great. Gangs of the despised peasantry, “like demons set at large,”52 were moving against the nobility’s granaries and estates. They had stormed palaces and divided entire treasuries among “the poor, the base and the weak.”53 Most shockingly of all, “the ignoble plebeians” were said to have passed around women captured during these assaults, handing even the perfumed wives of nobles from peasant to peasant.54 A high-born lady streaked with the filth and the sweat of the landless: here was the ultimate image of order turned to chaos.
What did this turning of the world upon its head portend? Surely nothing less than the end of time itself. The Zoroastrian faithful had long believed that things were not eternal, and that the great struggle between Ohrmazd and Ahriman was destined to resolve itself in one final and climactic confrontation. No one, prior to Zoroaster, had ever contemplated such a notion: that mankind, rather than reproducing itself for ever, generation after endless generation, might instead be heading towards a fixed and definite end; that a terminal clash between good and evil might be approaching; that the whole universe might be weighed in the balance and judged. Such notions, doubtless, sat readily with troubled times; but the collapse of Iranshahr into near anarchy was not the only reason why anxiety and anticipation had risen, by the time of Kavad’s reign, to an unprecedented fever pitch. No less influential, perhaps, was the date that scholars had recently assigned to Zoroaster’s birth: a thousand years before the present. People had come to feel themselves living in the shadow of something truly portentous—a millennium. For decades, this had served to foster eerie whisperings: that a new prophet was destined to appear, one who would serve as the seal of all who had gone before him and would usher in, for his followers, a golden age of equality, justice and peace.55The Zoroastrian establishment had found it increasingly difficult, amid the miseries of the age, to ring-fence such talk. The rumours spread; and, as they spread, they mutated and evolved. To the poor, especially, they seemed to offer a route map to a juster and happier future. The ragged armies of the dispossessed, when they seized the property of the rich, were motivated by more than mere hatred, or even hunger. Just as the mowbeds passionately believed themselves entrusted by Ohrmazd with the maintenance of the traditional order of things, so had the poor, no less passionately, come to believe themselves entrusted with a divine mission to bring it crashing down around their heads. Men, they declared, were created equal. It followed, then, that all good things, from food to land to women, should be held in common. The privileges of the nobility, the pretensions of the priesthood: both had to be dissolved. Such were the demands of the self-proclaimed “Adherents of Justice”: the world’s first communist manifesto.