by Andrew Shellshear
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The first day of Summer brought rumblings and flashes of bright blue light from the mountain. At night Lasa and her brother Tassa crept across the moonlit meadow, crossed the ford and climbed the rocky foothills to the old church. The bell tower had a fine view over the monastery, and sometimes in Winter the wind would bring sounds of bells and chanting, and the sun went down early and lights lit up all over the mountain.
But in Winter, they couldn't stay up in the bell tower for long, even wrapped in their best furs. Summer was the time for spying, though there was no wind and the lights were few and far between. This Summer promised to be an especially exciting one. Halfway up the mountain in the Denonimican's cloister was a tall spindle tower. Bright blue flashes came from within the windows, bright enough to light up the mountainside. Seconds later, the thunder, a deep booming echoing sound that deliciously churned their stomachs. Lasa and Tassa watched as short robed figures ran up and down the broad ramp that spiralled the outside of the tower, carrying scythes and nets and glinting swords, and wheeling carts filled with large burlap bundles. The next morning, Pa took them aside. "You're not to go up to the old church," he said. "Not for any reason. Not to rescue a goat. Not to answer a cry for help. And especially not to spy on the monastery!" A deep rumble underlined his point, but it was the same point Pa made every year, and every year Lasa and Tassa ignored him and went up anyway. This year, Pa had a new strategy. He looked outside and saw the mid-morning heat-haze wavering over the fields. With a groan, he clutched his back and sank down in his chair. "I cannot work today. Tassa, you must milk the goats. Lasa, you must churn the butter. And when you've done that, you must both husk the wheat!" That night, Lasa was so tired from the hard work in the hot sun that she went straight to sleep. But Tassa's curiosity was insatiable. He staggered across the meadow, splashed through the ford, and clambered up the foothills to the old church. "I think the spindle tower is growing shorter," he reported to Lasa in the morning, yawning prodigiously. "The monks look frantic. There must be a terrible beast in the tower, eating it from the inside." The flowers on the window sill were wilting in the heat, and when they looked outside they saw mirages on the meadow, mirages of tiny monks lashing themselves with birch rods. Pa looked outside too, groaned, went down the celler, and brought up a block of ice. He fetched a pillow, and a towel, and a scroll from the library, and some ink, and a peacock feather quill, then he lay on his stomach on the kitchen table, with the pillow under his elbows and the towel on his back and the ice on the towel. "You will both have to do all the chores again," he said, and opened the scroll. It was a long, densely written monograph on elephants, and he spent the day annotating it carefully, and calling for Lasa and Tassa to help him every half hour by fetching the green ink, or replacing the ice, or making his lunch. By evening, Lasa was tired, but Tassa was reeling as he walked. Pa watched his glazed expression at dinner, and chuckled to himself. He had a further trick up his sleeve. "Lasa, won't you fetch a bottle of wine from the celler?" he said. Tassa fell asleep at the table after his first glass of the St. Lucius, and Pa and Lasa helped him to bed, then finished off the rest of the bottle. But Lasa filled up her glass with water whenever Pa wasn't looking. Late that night, when she heard Pa snoring, she crept out of the house, across the moonlit meadow, through the ford, up the rocky hillside, and up the bell tower of the old church. The first thing that she noticed was that the spindle tower was shorter, much shorter than before. Monks still ran up and down the spiral ramp on the outside, but there was also a large cluster of them on either side of the tower, armed with ropes tied to the very peak of the pointed roof, and to a big wooden scaffold that emerged from the highest window and rose even above the peak. As she watched, the monks on the left started pulling at the ropes, and after a few moments she noticed that the roof was tipping over, lifting right off the tower on one side, and that the monks on the right-hand side were steadying it as it tipped. A brilliant blue light shone through the gap between the roof and the rim of the tower. It looked like a swarm of ants armed with cotton threads, opening a beer stein filled with fireflies. Before long, the monks had completely tipped the roof off the top of the tower, and the illusion was complete, for the roof was hinged, and it dangled upside-down by the side of the tower. The glowing blue light shone upwards and illuminated the clouds. "What's inside?" said Tassa the next day. "I don't know yet. I couldn't see." "That's not fair!" said Tassa. "You should have stayed longer. Now we'll never find out!" Pa watched them all day. It was stiflingly hot in the morning, but then it rained in the afternoon, blue-light from the spindle tower visible against the clouds. Despite this, Pa became absorbed in the monograph and forgot to keep them busy, so both Lasa and Tassa were energy-filled, awake, and eager that evening. Pa went to bed early, but Lasa and Tassa were careful not to depart until after midnight, when they heard him snoring. They crept out together and went across the blue-lit meadow. Suddenly Lasa stopped. "Look there!" she said. She pointed up at the sky, at the clouds which were still glowing blue from the light of the opened spindle tower. Then she pointed down, and Tassa saw that the clouds were nicely reflected in the river. The she pointed a little to the left, and Tassa saw their sneaky Pa silhouetted in the reflection, sitting in the darkness under the old willow tree by the ford, waiting for unwary children to try and sneak past. "We will have to go around," she said. But they quickly realised that the river was swollen from the rains, and the ford was the only way across. "I have an idea," said Tassa. "One of us will go to the ford, and get caught by Pa. When he leaves, the other goes ahead, sees all, and reports back." Lasa agreed, and they played a quick game of stonejack to decide who would be the sacrifice. "Stone, bone, Jack and Jill," they chanted quietly, "Lost and tossed on devil's hill!" and made three fist shapes, and Tassa lost. He sighed, and Lasa crouched down by the fence as he crept down to the ford, and was caught by Pa and escorted back to bed when Pa found, too late, that Lasa had also disobeyed him. For the rest of the Summer, both Tassa and Lasa had to sleep on the floor next to Pa's bed, which was especially annoying because he snored. Lasa waded through the ford and climbed up the rocky hillside and finally climbed the old church bell tower, and looked over to the mountain. It seemed like the whole monastery was awake that night, thousands and thousands of windows lit with torches, and monks and nuns and clerics and scholors everywhere, racing from castles to caves, from churches to crags to cloisters, from the great stone circles and the highest spires to the smallest gibbets, and all faces turning again and again to the spindle tower. The tower itself was almost gone. Perhaps it had spiralled into the ground - the rooftop, still flipped open, now touched the ground. In the middle of the tower, concealed before but now rising up high above it, was a giant fir tree. Lasa could see that the trunk itself was a twisted narrow spiral, and the branches that spread out at regular intervals, they were twisted and spirally too. Hanging from these branches were great glowing blue fir cones, and they were slowly spinning on their stems as if blown by an imaginary wind. Suddenly there was a mighty bang, and a flash so bright that Lasa was blinded, and a whistling sound that got louder and louder until with a crash, rocks flying, the tower shook violently and she feared she would be thrown to the ground with the tower on top of her. But minutes passed, and the tower remained standing, and Lasa eventually found her feet. Her eyes felt dry and sore, and she could see only a pattern like a comet stamped out in front of her, but just as she was fearing blindness forever, her vision started returning at the edges. In the rubble of the old church vestry, almost beneath her, she could make out a glowing blue cone. The kernels had cracked open revealing blue gossamer wings, dozens of them, as perfectly formed as petals of a flower. The cone was slowly spinning, like a run-down top, and she realised that it was digging itself in, winding itself into the earth, pushing aside the rocks and ruins. The wings, pointing outwards, were slowly forced upward until one by one they snapped off. The cone dug itself further and further in, until all that could be seen was a blue light shining out of the hole, and even that disappeared after a time. Finally, all was silent. Lasa's vision had mostly returned by now so she went down the tower, not trusting herself to stand, but sitting on each step before lowering herself onto the next one. Ten steps from the ground, she started sliding, bumping down the stairs faster and faster until the bottom, when she leaped forward off the bottom stair and into the vestry, running as fast as she could past the hole, ducking down on an impulse to grasp one of the broken wings as she went by. It was light and almost as tall as her, and was as stiff as a sycamore seed. She held it high in the air and yelled at the top of her lungs, running down the hill, lit by its soft glow. Pa was waiting for her at the ford but she had hidden the wing by then, and not all the punishments in the world were enough to make her regret the expedition. Tassa was even envious enough to risk another trip to the old church, but there was no trace of the cone, not even a wing. The monastery appeared to have settled down to its usual sedate pace. The spindle tower was now flush with the ground, rooftop back in place. It looked more like a tent than a tower now, and it remained that way to the end of their days.
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