Darius the Great Is Not Okay(39)

Even though the trees and manicured lawns were green, Persepolis itself was brown and dry. Pillars of stone reached for the sun, their surfaces smoothed by wind and age. I had to crane my neck to see their tops, but the sky was so bright and the sun was so high I started sneezing.

“Wow,” I said when I regained the power of speech.

Dad paused beside us. “Wow is right. Look at it.”

Many of the stone pillars were broken. Some were cracked but still standing, barricaded with Plexiglas to keep people from touching them. Others had already experienced non-passive failures. Huge chunks of brown rubble lay forlorn across the loose rocky ground. Tufts of grass poked out from a few shady spots, but mostly, it was dry and stark.

I felt like I had stepped onto the surface of the planet Vulcan, and was finally going to master the Kolinahr discipline, embracing logic and purging myself of all emotions.

Dad pulled his sketchbook out of his Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag—Dad was never far from his sketchbook—and stepped off the wooden planks onto the gravel to sketch the nearest row of broken pillars.

Laleh and Babou had already wandered off, so Sohrab led me to a giant statue of a lamassu.

A lamassu is pretty much the Persian version of a sphinx: a mishmash animal, with the head of a man, the body of an ox, and the wings of an eagle. As far as I knew, no riddles were involved in mythological encounters with lamassu, but there was probably some extremely high level taarofing.

This lamassu was one of a pair. Its mate had been decapitated at some point, but still, the statues towered over us, mute sentinels of a fallen empire.

“The Gate of All Nations,” Sohrab said. He gestured around to the lamassus and pillars surrounding us. “That’s the name in English.”

It wasn’t much of a gate anymore, since anyone of any nation could have easily stepped around it instead of walking through. But it was still amazing.

Behind the lamassu, more columns sprouted from the ground like ancient trees in a petrified forest, forty feet tall, spindly but still miraculously upright. Giant stone slabs formed the remains of what must once have been a breathtaking structure.

Sohrab held my shoulders and guided me through the Gate of All Nations, then turned me toward another long wood-planked path where Mom and Mamou were waiting for us.

“This is the palace of Darioush the First,” Sohrab said. “Darioush the Great.”

“Wow,” I said.

My vocabulary had failed me.

“Pretty cool, right?” Mom said. She looked back toward the entrance. “Where’s your dad?

“Sketching the pillars.”

“Go get him, would you?” She tucked a strand of hair back under her turquoise headscarf, and then did the same for her mother. “We should stay together.”

“What about Laleh and Babou?”

Mamou said, “They’ll be fine.”

I ran back to grab Dad.

“Mom says we should stick together.”

“All right.”

But Dad had to get sketches of the Gate of All Nations too, until Mom finally lost her patience and came to get him herself.

She waved her arm at the crowds around us. “Everyone is going to think you’re planning a drone strike,” she whispered, her voice sharp as vinegar.

Shirin Kellner could be formidable when she needed to be.

“Sorry,” Dad said. He slipped the sketchbook back into his Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag.

Dad knew better than to argue with Mom when she used her vinegar voice.

He bumped elbows with me as we followed Mom.

I didn’t understand why he did that.

“Huge, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m grateful you’re getting to see this.”

“Me too.”

Dad almost smiled.

Almost.

Maybe he was doing his best.

“Darioush!” Sohrab called. He waved me forward.

“Coming!”



* * *





It wasn’t like the Ruins of Persepolis were an entire city.

At its height, Persepolis had covered a huge area. Not as big as Greater Portland, maybe, but still. The part we were in, the part with the actual ruins—Takhte Jamsheed—was small enough to fit in our neighborhood back home.

Sohrab led me through the Apadana, the complex’s main palace. There was not much of it left: several enormous pillars, even taller than the Gate of All Nations; and some ornate staircases, though their wide, shallow steps had a bizarre rise-to-run ratio; and a bunch of stone arches whose structural integrity fields had held up impressively well over thousands of years.

The whole thing smelled like sun-baked dust—it made me think of Mom running the vacuum, which was weird—but it wasn’t old or musty. The wind from the mountains around Shiraz kept a light breeze spinning through the Apadana, quieter and more subtle than the Dancing Fan could ever hope to be.

In pictures, old buildings are always white and smooth. But in real life, Persepolis was brown and rough and imperfect. There was something magical about it: the low walls, all that remained of some ancient hall, and the pillars looming over me like giants in an ancient playground.

According to Sohrab, many of the buildings were never finished before Alexander the Great sacked Persepolis.

Alexander the Great was the Trent Bolger of Ancient Persia.