Since it’s coming up to my birthday, this posting is a treat for me. And for those of you who are following along with my Vis and Ramin extracts
The first one of these set up Vis as something of a spoiled brat; while the second spelt out how she was matched up, Parthian-style, to marry her brother, Viru – after her mother forgot she had betrothed her daughter to the elderly King Mobad.
The marriage is unconsummated on the wedding night (because Vis was menstruating) – and the next day Mobad’s brother Zard arrives to demand the bride. There’s lots of toing and froing, with Mobad’s brothers gving advice – including Ramin who “had been in love with Vis since they had been two childish friends”.
Mobad sends “so many gifts to Queen Shahru no scribe could ever read the record through” – and the dazzled Queen let Mobad into her (and Vis’) castle late on a pitch black night:
Orion and Sirius over the Alborz Mountains. APOD NASA image
The firmament was like a canopy
Studded with jewels, vast in its majesty,
Secure and barely moving, strongly tied
With heavenly guy ropes to the mountainside.
The sun and moon were gone, as if they kept
A lover’s secret tryst and sweetly slept,
Each star was like a pearl set carefully
Against a ground of lapis lazuli;
The heavens extended like an iron wall;
The stars grew languid and inscrutable.
The bull and ram were paralyzed with fear,
Sensing the lion of the sky was near;
The heavenly twins were locked in their embrace,
A water wheel revolving in one place;
The crab slept quietly at their feet, you’d say
Its claws and soul had both been snatched away;
The lion stood before the crab as though
Immovable, its tail curved like a bow
Arching above its massive back and head,
Its eyes and mouth glowed pomegranate red.
