Around the year 1000 a landowner in Tus called Ferdowsi spent about thirty years putting the old stories of Iran into verse: some fifty thousand couplets, from the first king of the world to the fall of the last Persian one. The Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, is why those stories are still around a thousand years later, and why a good deal of the Persian language came with them.
Its biggest figure is Rostam, out of Zabol: lives for centuries, wears a coat of tiger skin, and gets sent again and again to fix what kings break. He rides Rakhsh, the only horse that could carry him, picked as a foal because he was the one that did not buckle when Rostam leaned a hand on his back. Rostam's Seven Trials, the seven stages of the road into Mazandaran, are the spine of this game.
The helmet, the mail, and the tiger skin nobody ever draws him without.
Rostam's father. Born white haired, left on a mountain, and raised by the Simorgh.
Dappled, the poem says: rose petals scattered over saffron.
Painted for Nard: Seven Trials. There will be more of the game here when there is more of it worth showing.