Rakhsh
Rostam's horse. The only one that could take his weight.
Rostam found Rakhsh by walking down the herds of Zabol with his hand out, pressing on one back after another. Every horse in the country sank under it. Then a foal the colour of rose petals thrown across saffron stood there and did not move, and the search was over.
They asked the herdsman what the foal cost. He said the price of this horse is Iran.
The name is the flash a colour makes when the light catches it. What the poem keeps coming back to, though, is not how he looks. It is how little he has to be told. He fights on his own judgement. He settles things while Rostam is asleep and does not wake him for it. He finds water in a country that has none. The most famous trouble on the road to Mazandaran starts with something Rakhsh decides entirely by himself.
Which is why calling him a mount misses him. Twice the story turns on the horse being right about something Rostam is wrong about, and the poem never once separates the two of them.
In the game
Rakhsh is not a piece you move. His name turns up on the things that have to do with ground covered: how far something gets in one go, and what it costs when it has gone a long way without a rest.