Bizhan and Manizheh
بیژن و منیژه
He was left in a covered pit to die. She begged in the streets to keep feeding him.
Bizhan, a young Iranian champion, meets Manizheh, the daughter of Afrasiyab, king of Turan and Iran's oldest enemy, at a festival on the border, and neither of them is sensible about it. She has him drugged and carried into her father's palace to keep him.
They are caught. Afrasiyab wants him hanged; his commander Piran talks him down to something worse. Bizhan is dropped into a pit in the desert and an enormous stone is rolled over the mouth of it. Manizheh is stripped of her rank, her clothes, and her household, and driven out barefoot.
She does not leave. She lives rough beside the stone and begs from door to door in rags, pushing whatever she is given through the gap to keep him alive, for months. When Rostam finally comes into Turan disguised as a merchant to find him, it is Manizheh he finds first, and it is her, not the hero, who has kept the man alive.
Why it matters
Ferdowsi frames this one personally: he opens it with a sleepless night and a candle and a companion who tells him the story. It is also the clearest case for reading the epic's women as its most stubborn characters. Manizheh does the hard part, alone, for months, and the rescue is a formality by comparison.