“On thy account, most amiable prince, do I now consent to transfer my just revenge from this vain world to a higher court.”
Mūhteshim presented Firdusī with a goodly sum of money and forwarded him on his journey, fearful lest the sultan’s rage or the vizier’s malice might overtake and ruin him.
This proved to be a wise precaution, for the king had discovered a sarcastic epigram which Firdusī had written on the wall of the great mosque the night of his departure, and on the next day Ayaz delivered to the furious monarch the insulting letter which the poet had left with him for that purpose, and a large reward was offered for the apprehension of the fugitive. At length, however, the sultan received a long letter from his friend Mūhteshim, who related his meeting with Firdusī, now, in his old age, a penniless wanderer, after having devoted the best years of his life in the constant exercise of his great talents for the execution of his king’s wishes, and gently reproached the Shāh for allowing himself to be imposed upon by the evil advice of malicious courtiers; he also informed him of the forgiving spirit the poet had manifested in destroying his own brilliant satire which was composed at the monarch’s expense, and closed the letter by quoting the couplet which Firdusī had used in the letter to himself.
The complaints from his subjects also began to come to the royal ears, and all of this, together with the reproaches of his own conscience, produced in his mind a strange combination of grief and rage, of indignation and regret. He disgraced the malicious vizier, and fined him sixty thousand drachms of gold, the same amount which he had prevented him from paying to Firdusī, and deeply regretted his own injustice to the gifted bard; but still, he could not forgive the cutting satire of the letter which had been brought him by Ayaz, in which the poet had taunted him with his low birth as being one of the causes of his cowardice and meanness.
Firdusī was protected by the Arabian government, and after some years returned and lived with his family at Tus, but he was old, grieved and broken down, and at last he died in his quiet home, at the age of eighty-three. In the meantime Shāh Mahmūd, hearing of his return to Tus, and anxious to render justice, though tardily, to the man he had wronged, sent an envoy with sixty thousand drachms of gold, together with quantities of silks, brocades, velvets, and other costly presents, to Firdusī as a peace offering. But as the royal train of loaded camels entered one gate of the city a mournful procession went out of another, and followed the dead poet to the place of his burial.