What He Outlived

The Shahnameh gives Zal an old age nobody would want, and refuses to look away from it. He outlives his son, who is killed in a pit of spears dug by Shaghad — Zal's other son, born to a servant woman, and the poem's coldest piece of family arithmetic. Afterwards Esfandiyar's son Bahman comes for the house of Sistan and puts the old man in chains, and Zal is freed only by another man's intercession. He had been left on a mountain to die as an infant and ends up the last one standing, which is not a reward.