The Door at Samangan

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh brings her in through a door that opens at midnight. Rostam has lost Rakhsh while sleeping near the Turanian border and tracked him on foot to Samangan, where the king feasts him. At the darkest hour a slave enters carrying a taper, and behind her the king's daughter. She names herself: his one child, never seen by anyone outside her own rooms. Then she says why she has come, and the poem lets her say it in her own order — that she has heard the tales of him and wants him, that she has set her prudence aside for it, that God may give her a child of his, and that she can bring his horse back.