An Accidental Messiah by Dan Sofer

Author:Dan Sofer [Sofer, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dan Sofer
Published: 2017-10-21T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 42

The renowned sage opened his eyes. A sky of clear, dazzling blue filled his visual field, framed by the branches of leafy trees and what appeared to be a tall monument. Large arcs rose high in the air to form a lattice of metal spires. Never before had he seen such a structure—an object of great architectural beauty and no doubt the life’s work of a master smith—on any of his travels or among the pointy domes of Fustat.

He brought his hands to his face and studied them, wrinkled and weathered as usual. Then he touched his beard and face, his head, chest, and thighs. His physical body was intact but without a single shred of clothing. No funerary shrouds, not even a turban for his head!

This was not the World of Souls, the immortal spiritual realm in which Active Intellects merged with the Mind of God, for there were no bodies in that world of pure thought.

This must be the Resurrection. Ha!

The deduction amused him. His detractors had accused him of denying the resurrection of the physical body, despite his inclusion of the belief in his Thirteen Principles. Even after he had elucidated his views on the matter in his letter to the Jews of Yemen, still his critics condemned him as a heretic. A disciple of Aristotle, they said. A rationalist. This’ll show them!

He turned over. The hard ground beneath him was covered in identical hexagons as gray and as smooth as fresh mortar. There was nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes wrote, but the artisans of This World had honed their methods since his death.

He got to his feet and took a few wobbly steps.

How long had he slept in the dust? Had the Son of David arrived?

Was his son Abraham still alive? According to his son’s calculations, the Redemption would begin only a few decades hence, and, although he had warned his son against Calculating the End, now he hoped that his son’s predictions had been accurate.

A dull pain throbbed in his skull. Headaches resulted from excess humors in the body. As a respected healer, he would have prescribed peppermint tea and the avoidance of dairy products, but as he glanced about the stony hillocks, he found no tea decanters, only a street of black pitch and a table.

A young man with blond hair sat at the table, which was draped in a white sheet with blue hexagrams. The man looked up from a black tablet of shiny obsidian, smiled, jumped from his seat, and rushed over.

“Welcome, Honored Rabbi,” he said in Hebrew, not Arabic. How curious.

The young man helped him into a fluffy cloak as soft as fine wool and as white as snow, and tied the garment with a white sash.

“Here.” The man dropped two white pellets into the palm of his hand.

“What, may I ask, are these?”

“For your headache. Swallow them.” He held out a glass of water. The glass was extremely thin and transparent, and crackled in his grasp like parchment but did not shatter.

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