Afrásiyáb and Kai Khusrau continue the war with renewed vigour, Pírán and Gúdarz being in chief command on the Túránian and Íránian sides respectively. After some abortive negotiations the campaign opens, Húmán and Bízhan fight in single combat, and the former is slain. A general engagement between the two hosts follows, but the result is indecisive and both generals send for reinforcements. In the interval they arrange a combat of eleven champions a side in which the Íránians are completely victorious, all the Túránians, including Pírán himself, being slain with the exception of Gurwí—the executioner of Siyáwush—who is taken alive by Gív. Kai Khusrau comes up, and Lahhák and Farshídward—Pírán's two surviving brothers—abandon their army and take to flight. They are pursued and captured by Gustaham, who is himself severely wounded but is saved by Bízhan and cured by Kai Khusrau, to whom also the Túránian army capitulates, and Gurwí is put to death.
The Battle of the Twelve Rukhs or Champions is one of the most celebrated and favourite passages in the Sháhnáma from the Persian point of view, probably owing to the completeness of the Íránian triumph, the poet being determined, in spite of some evident qualms of conscience, that the Túránians should not get the best of it in any way. The English reader being unprejudiced probably would prefer a more equally balanced result.
The word Rukh is the familiar Rook of the game of chess, and is used metaphorically by the poet as an equivalent for Champion. The word really means cheek, the two sides of the chess-board where the Rooks or Castles are placed being looked upon as its two cheeks. Formerly, moreover, the Castles moved as the Queen does now, and were therefore by far the most powerful pieces or Champions of the board, the piece which we call the Queen being then restricted to close attendance on the King and to a single move, as appears from the poet's own account of the game when he gives the legend of its origin, after describing its introduction into Persia during the reign of Núshírwán.
The reader will notice that there are really only eleven combatants on each side in the battle of the champions. To make up the full number the preliminary struggle between Húmán and Bízhan must be included, and even then there are only eleven combatants on the Íránian side to twelve on the Túránian, as Bízhan fights twice.
Bízhan appears to have been a special favourite of the poet, who never loses an opportunity of putting him forward.
§ 1. The Prelude is translated in the metre of the original, which, the reader may be reminded, is uniform throughout the Sháhnáma.
§ 4. “We will not rest and sleep, my mace and I, The field of battle and Afrásiyáb.”
These lines, which form a couplet in the original, are said to have been quoted to Mahmúd on a certain occasion by one of his ministers, and to have caused the Sultán to seek too late for a reconciliation with Firdausí.*
The tradition goes back to within a century of the poet's death. The reading of the first hemistich of the couplet varies.
§§ 8-11. The time of the usually prudent Húmán being at hand he becomes fey, as Bahrám did on a previous occasion.*
§ 14. Shabáhang (Sirius) is given elsewhere as the name of Farhád's steed.*
Bízhan's steed was called Shabrang.*
Shabáhang seems used metri causá for Shabrang. One would gather from another passage, taken alone, that Bízhan used Gív's steed in the battle with Húmán.*