Travellers in Magic (33 page)

His newly-made kings urged him to take the crown intended for him, to announce the date of his entrance into Constantinople. He delayed, remembering the evil vision of the dark prison.

But in his euphoria he began to see another vision, one in which he took the crown from the sultan. He understood that history would be split at Constantinople, would travel down one of two diverging paths. He began to make arrangements to sail.

Two days before they were to leave Sarah came to him. “I'm not going with you,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I will be king, ruler of the world, and you will be at my side, my queen. This is what I have worked for all these years. How can you give that up?”

“I don't want to be queen.”

“You don't—Why not?”

“I don't feel safe with you any longer. I don't like the things you ask me to do.”

“What things?”

“What things? How can you ask me that when you tell me to lie with every one of your followers? You're like the nobleman, passing me around when you get tired of me.”

“I did nothing. It was you who lusted after Aaron.”

“I didn't—”

“And others too,” he said, remembering the glances she had given men in the congregation. She
had
pitied him, and hated him too, just as he had always thought. “Do you think I didn't notice?”

“I've done nothing,” she said. “I—”

“I won't grant you a divorce, you know.”

“Of course not. If we're married you still own me, even if I'm not there. That dream you told me about, where you took Jerusalem as your bride—you want to master Jerusalem, make her bow to your will. You want to control the entire world. But have you ever thought about how you will govern once you have the sultan's crown? You want to be ruler of the earth, but what kind of ruler will you be?”

“What do you know about statecraft, about policy? I have been ordained by God to be king. And you—you have been chosen to be queen.”

“No,” she said. “I have not.”

She turned to leave. “I excommunicate you!” he said, shouting after her. “I call upon God to witness my words—you are excommunicated!”

She continued walking as if she did not hear him.

He watched her go. Perhaps it was just as well that she was leaving. He had known for a long time that she could not grasp the vastness of the task he had been given; she had never studied Kabbalah, or had visions of the light of God. His work in the world was far more important than her private feelings, or his.

He and his followers set sail on December 30, 1665. Word of his departure had gone before him. His boat was intercepted in the Sea of Marmara, and he was brought ashore in chains.

He sits in his prison in Gallipoli and waits for the light. He has not had a vision in many days; perhaps, he thinks, they have left him. He wonders if they have been consumed by the great fires he has seen in the future.

What had gone wrong? He and his followers had been so certain; he had seen the signs, read all the portents. He was destined to be the ruler of the world.

He puts his head in his hands and laughs harshly. Ruler of the world! And instead he sits in prison, waiting to be killed or released at the whim of the Turkish sultan.

The light of God is broken, dispersed throughout the world. And like the light his own mind is broken, splitting.

There is a knock on the door, and Nathan enters. “How did you find me?” Shabbetai asks.

Nathan appears surprised. “Don't you know?” he asks.

Shabbetai says nothing.

“I bribed a great many people to get you here,” Nathan says. “Are you comfortable?”

“I—Yes. Quite comfortable.”

“The sultan has returned from Crete,” Nathan says. “There are rumors that he will want to see you.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Soon, I think. He is alarmed by the support you have among the people of Turkey.” Nathan pauses and then goes on. “Some of your followers are worried. They don't believe that we can hold out against the combined armies of the sultan.”

“Tell them not to fear,” Shabbetai says. He is surprised at how confident he sounds. But there is no reason to worry Nathan and the others, and perhaps the visions will return. “Tell them that God watches over me.”

Nathan nods, satisfied.

A few days later Shabbetai is taken by guards from Gallipoli to Adrianople. They pass through the city and come to a strong high wall. Men look down at them from the watchtowers.

Soldiers with plumed helmets stand at the wall's gate. The soldiers nod to them and motion them through. Beyond the gate is a courtyard filled with fountains and cypress trees and green plots of grass where gazelles feed.

They turn left, and come to a door guarded by soldiers. They enter through this door and are shown before the sultan and his council.

“Do you claim to be the Messiah?” a councilor asks Shabbetai.

“No,” he says.

“What?” the councilor says, astonished.

“No. Perhaps I was the Messiah once. But the light has left me—I see no more and no less than other people.”

The sultan moves his hand. The councilor nods to him and turns toward Shabbetai. “I see,” he says. “You understand that we cannot just take your word for this. We cannot say, Very well, you may go now. Your followers outside are waiting for you—you have become a very dangerous man.”

“We are prepared to offer you a choice,” the sultan says. “Either convert to Islam or be put to death immediately.”

The light returns, filling the room. Shabbetai gasps; he had begun to think it lost forever. The light breaks. Two paths branch off before him.

On one path he accepts death. His followers, stunned, sit in mourning for him for the required seven days. Then Nathan pronounces him a martyr, and others proclaim that he has ascended to heaven.

His following grows. Miracles are seen, and attested to by others. An army forms; they attack the Turks. A long and bloody war follows. The sultan, the man sitting so smugly before him, is killed by one of his own people, a convert to what is starting to be called Sabbatarianism.

After a decade the Turks surrender, worn out by the fighting against the Sabbatarians on one side and the Venetians on the other. Shabbetai's followers take Constantinople; Hagia Sophia, once a church and then a mosque, is converted a third time by the victorious army.

The Sabbatarians consolidate their power, and spread across Europe and Asia. First hundreds and then thousands of heretics are put to death. Holy wars flare. Men hungry for power come to Constantinople and are given positions in the hierarchy of the new religion.

Finally, using the terrifying tools of the far future, the Sabbatarians set out to kill everyone who is not a believer. The broken light that Shabbetai saw in his vision shines across the sky as city after city is laid waste. Poisons cover the earth. At the end only a few thousand people are left alive.

Shabbetai turns his gaze away from the destruction and looks down the other path. Here he becomes a convert to Islam; he changes his name to Aziz Mehmed Effendi. The sultan, pleased at his decision, grants him a royal pension of 150 piasters a day.

His followers are shocked, but they soon invent reasons for his apostasy. Nathan explains that the conversion was necessary, that the Messiah must lose himself in darkness in order to find all the shards of God hidden in the world.

Over the years his followers begin to lose hope. Sarah dies in 1674. Two years later he himself dies. Several groups of Sabbatarians continue to meet in secret; one group even survives to the mid-twentieth century.

He turns back to the first path. Once again he is drawn to the vision of annihilation. An end to breeding and living and dying, an end to the mad ceaseless activity that covers the earth. Perhaps this is what God requires of him.

He remembers Sarah, her desire to lie with him. She thought him powerless; very well, he will show her something of power. Flame will consume her descendants, all the children he had been unable to give her.

The moon spins before him, fragments into a thousand pieces. He understands that his vision is not an allegory but real, that people will become so strong they can destroy the moon.

His head pounds. He is not powerless at all. He is the most powerful man in the world. All the people he has seen in his travels, the bakers and learned men and farmers and housewives and bandits, all of them depend for their lives on his next word.

He thinks of Sarah again, her tangled hair, her breath warm on his cheek. If he lets the world live all her children will be his, although she will not know it. Every person in the world will be his child. He can choose life, for himself and for everyone; he can do what he was chosen to do and heal the world.

The light blazes and dies. He looks up at the sultan and his men and says, calmly, “I will choose Islam.”

A
FTERWORD

The story of Shabbetai Zevi has fascinated me ever since I first came across it. If he hadn't converted to Islam, of course, we would have another world religion.

I showed this story to the Sycamore Hill Writers' Workshop and to my own writers' workshop in the Bay Area. Both groups seemed to like it, but after I made some of the changes they had suggested I realized that I could not imagine it in any of the existing science fiction markets. This complete inability to write for a market has been a recurring problem throughout my career. I would not recommend blithe disregard for the marketplace as a way to go to any beginning writer; in my own case, however, I don't seem to be able to help it. Therefore, this story appears here for the first time.

Acknowledgments

“Alfred”—
Asimov's Science Fiction,
December, 1992.

“Cassandra's Photographs”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
August, 1987.

“Ever After”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
December, 1984.

“Tourists”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
February, 1985.

“Rites of Spring”—
Asimov's Science Fiction,
March, 1994.

“Midnight News”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
March, 1990.

“Preliminary Notes on the Jang”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
May, 1985.

“A Traveller at Passover”—
Pulphouse,
Winter, 1991.

“Infinite Riches”—
Asimov's Science Fiction,
April, 1993.

“Death Is Different”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
September, 1988.

“Breadcrumbs and Stones”—
Snow White, Blood Red,
edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, AvoNova/Morrow, 1993.

“The Woman in the Painting”—
Fantasy & Science Fiction,
July, 1993.

“Daily Voices”—
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
April, 1986.

“A Game of Cards”—
Sisters in Fantasy,
edited by Susan Shwartz, forthcoming.

“Split Light” is original to this collection.

About the Author

Lisa Goldstein has published ten novels and dozens of short stories under her own name and two fantasy novels under the pseudonym Isabel Glass. Her most recent novel is
The Uncertain Places
, which won the Mythopoeic Award. Goldstein received the National Book Award for
The Red Magician
and the Sidewise Award for her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden.” Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Some of her stories appear in the collection
Travellers in Magic
.

Goldstein has worked as a proofreader, library aide, bookseller, and reviewer. She lives with her husband and their overexuberant Labrador retriever, Bonnie, in Oakland, California. Her website is
www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Lisa Goldstein

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7364-9

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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EBOOKS BY LISA GOLDSTEIN

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