The Spiritstream Shoals
by Sharon E. Woods

Only one red spirit has been caught on the Towers of Galee, eighty-nine years ago by a spinner called but Saleh's Youngest in the chapel records. Had she been able to sell her prize, I imagine we might have known her real name. But when she climbed off the metal weaving of Tower East and back to the world of the breathing, the minister took one look at the vermillion threads wound about her spindles and declared no merchant worthy of them.

My sister Jula said a prayer every Four-Day service for Saleh's Youngest. Not, I am afraid, in pity for the nameless spinner, but in geniune thankfulness. For there was nothing she liked better than the sight of Minister Rhenia bedecked in the robe of her office - a red chasuble that glowed like the moon.

Of course, any sight of Minister Rhenia delighted Jula. She was sixteen, eleven months my senior and three inches taller, her green eyes bright with the eagerness to love. But, as she had confided to me in sisterly confidence, she didn’t like any of the boys of the village, and had long ago fixed her attention on the new minister. The fact Minister Rhenia never reciprocated this attention did nothing to deter her.

So it was neither of us had our chin tucked to our chests that summer Four-Day service when Minister Rhenia proclaimed the prayer of eternal thanks. The minister always intoned her words upward, toward the sunlight streaming through the laced ironwork of the chapel's dome, so no danger existed she would see dark faces poke up amidst the sea of prostrating gray and white forms. Jula took the opportunity to openly ogle, while I, figuring Jula had no ground to tattle on me, simply looked for the thrill of furtive rebellion.

"-- you have left us these tools and means to thrive upon your creations -- " The tendons on Minster Rhenia's upstretched neck pulsed as she intoned, her dark face flushed white in the sunlight. She looked to me like a corpse, all color washed from her skin, her outstretched arms bleached tree branches draped with the otherworldly red of the chasuble. I could never understand how Jula could drink in such a sight and still dream of sleeping with her. "We thank ye -- "

The ring of metal doused her words as it filled the air -- a long, sonorous quiver that shivered through the dome's latticework and crawled into the chapel's every nave.

Heads popped up to join mine and Jula's among the rows of figures, and mouths gaped as we listened to the echoes roll over the hills outside. I was old enough then to have heard the distinctive tones of all four of the Towers, their different heights and thickness of beams giving forth notes uniquely their own. This was Tower Fair, the tallest and oldest, vibrating from a large impact.

Minister Rhenia lowered her hands, her face gaining color and definition as it fell into the shadow of her auburn curls. A small smile pushed back the curves of her round face. "It seems the powers above are gratified by our prayer."

Uncomfortable laughter filtered through the chapel as restlessness shimmered through the ranks. Eyes flicked to the exit, fingers fidgeted the finer seams of Four-Day tunics and dresses. We were all thinking the same thing. There was only a finite amount of time.

"Far from me to deny the bounty granted us." Minister Rhenia raised her arms. "We thank ye, our lords. Grant us good fortune and speed in our hunt." Her smile tore into a grin at the six stanzas she had just skipped, and she made a shooing gesture with her hands. "What are you waiting for? Lords' speed!"

The chapel's old oak doors whacked against the stone figurines flanking the entrance as we spilled out, running down the steps and onto the main square of the village. Jula and I wasted no time, leaping over the dry basin of the central fountain to get ahead of the crowd and dashing down an alleyway toward our home, dry mud thumping beneath our bare feet.

Grandma, old and frail enough to be able to opt out of Four-Day services, was waiting at the door, our family's gray spiritweave shawl wrapped about her shoulders and our spindles in her hands. I rushed up and took my set, two well worn staffs a third my height, crafted from the wood that had fermented at the bottom of Galee's swamps. They were as dark and hard as obsidian, carved to fit the grip of thin fingers on one end and tapered to a knob on the other.

Jula dashed off as soon as she had her set, but Grandma caught my face before I could follow, her papery lips brushing my cheek with a kiss. "Speed be with you, Johana," she whispered. "Be careful."

I nodded, eager to get away. Jula had already disappeared around the corner of the narrow lane. But Grandma's grip held firm.

"Remember. Speed, but patience. Don't make the mistake your mother did."

I nodded again, swallowing hard to catch my breath. "Yes, Grandma."

She sighed, her face acknowledging she was likely advising the wrong sister, and let me go. Down the lane I ran, the spindles stabbing the air as my arms pumped, my fancy Four-Day dress flapping about my knees.

The Towers awaited me as I sped from the village, rising up from the heights of the jungle-coated hills that rose above the harbor. Four ramrod straight figures, silver webbing glinting as brightly as the sea, reaching upward to disappear into the slice of the spiritstream that rent the sky, their T's hidden in the formless cobalt blue.

On most days, I never paid them mind. Helping the weavers at the looms, weeding the rows of our garden or herding our sheep - I walked and worked under their shadow, and avoided looking at them. We were grateful for them - they gave us means to the wealth that drew merchants from across the world to our harbor - but to some they were gravestones.

As to their builders, we never spoke of them. My ancestors had landed on the isle two hundred years before, and found only the foundations of a town, a few roads, and the four great edifices. I never quite believed the Four-Day sermons that said our gods had left them for us.

Jula and I ran the entire way, up one of those ancient roads to the tallest hill where Tower Fair stood. A stone lined square of sheep-clipped grass greeted us at the summit, the four corner columns of the Tower stabbing a great outcrop of bedrock in its center. Jula did not even pause to catch her breath, running beneath it and leaping up to catch the lowest crossbeam of the webbed metal work. With a single kick, she swung herself up, her skirts flipping back to expose her long thighs before she righted herself and stood up. Stuffing my spindles under my belt, I followed suit, balancing myself with a sway of arms before making my way to the nearest column. All about us, other girls and boys light enough not to strain the beams did the same. Tower Fair's lower heights swarmed with white figures, a crowd of aphids crawling up the metalwork toward the slice of dark cobalt that cut across the cloud-strewn sky.

I climbed until I was just below the slipstream, and then paused, looking down with the metal still quivering and humming beneath my hands. The entire green isle of Galee lay splayed out below me, coves of aqua blue carved out of its sides amidst the glittering gray of the wide sea. A thumb-sized chapel lay amidst the toy huts of the village, and about the base of Tower Fair, crowds gathered. Parents and husbands and other villagers eager to see how rich the take would be. I could see Minister Rhenia's red chasuble, a drop of blood amidst the white and gray.

Taking a deep breath, I turned away and started upward again, letting the world below fade as the spiritstream closed about me like a bank of clouds.

I was never afraid of the darkness of spiritstream, its depthless deep blue, broken only by the metal of the Towers, who, like us and all things from the real world, glowed a soft silver. It was the wind that scared me - that flow of air, lifting my hair and pressing the cotton of my dress against my sweaty skin. No sensation of a chill or coolness came with it - no feeling you'll be blown physically off. Instead, it wiggled into you and tugged at everything inside, your hopes and dreams and all your emotions, seeking to grab hold and sweep it all away.

My knuckles whitened as I climbed higher, concentrating hard on my task and schooling my mind not to drift. I could see the tops of the other three Towers - glowing T's, detritus floating from their metal work like streams of silver river moss. Tower Fair, founded on the tallest of the hills, reached higher than the others, into the stronger current that sent moans down the columns when the spiritstream's flow grew heavy. Thus, like the highest shoals of Galee's harbors, it was the one that shipwrecked the most spiritsails.

I always wished, whenever I reached the top of a Tower and made my way down an arm of its T, that I would someday see a spiritsail in flight. I had only beheld wrecks of them - a billowing hexagonal sail, flapping and spinning on the ends of its stays, and the tattered remains of the woven net it carried behind it, tangled about the metal of the Tower's beams. There are some who climbed the Towers just to watch sails flow through the spiritstream, swaying with the current, spirits of all colors shimmering in their nets. But many of those people never came down - losing the gamble of staying too long in the spiritstream without a set purpose in mind. More than one body has been found up there, lashed to a post, glassy eyes upturned to watch for sails, all light of the soul they once held swept away in the currents. Sometimes I wonder if that was what my mother had done, when they told her to climb back up the tower and never come back.

Standing upright on the upper edge of Tower Fair's T, I pulled my spindles from my belt and held them up to balance myself as I walked down beams barely wider than my bare feet. A few of the others, perhaps six, including Jula, were ahead of me, softly luminous figures edging down the Tower's T toward the wreckage.

The spirits still clung to their craft, glowing, shapeless forms spiraled about the stays or the glowing bars of the Tower. All of them white, blue or gray. I had seen purple ones, even almost spun one on my spindles, but never the legendary ones of red, yellow or green. Theory has it such entities do not often ply the lower part of the spiritstream - that they are of a finer, privileged class that rides the stream a thousand feet above us. That always struck me funny, that people would presume beings of another world would have familiar things like royalty and hierarchies.

But none of us had ever heard of a spirit of gold. When it rose up, spiraling about one of the stays - a river of amber - glowing finer than anything I have ever seen - I nearly fell off the beam, never to be seen in the world of the breathing again.

Shouts rose up about me, and Jula and another girl, Velese, broke into a run, leaping over the gaps between the Tower's crossbeams in the effort to reach it first. The spirits were usually oblivious to us, passively continuing to puzzle out their predicament as we stuck our spindles into them and spun them, but this one appeared to not enjoy all the fuss. Snaking about the stay, it flowed gently away from the bars of the Tower, making its way out over the abyss toward the sail that bucked and spun like a kite in the spiritstream's flow.

Velese skidded to a halt, her spindles windmilling the air as she caught her balance, but Jula never stopped, leaping off the beam to land with bent knees on the wavering cord of the stay itself.

Grandma had taught us the skills. All the slow, hot afternoons while the other village children napped, she had made Jula and I navigate the limp ropes she had strung across our hut's garden. The bent knees, the lowering of our center of balance, the instinct to feel and anticipate the sways of a moving cord - we knew it all. The smart spirits, the ones that made the best silk, always went out on the stays, Grandma said. If you want to be the catcher of the finest threads, the ones that fetched the highest price, you had to learn to ride moving ropes.

But Grandma's lessons had been meant for short forays, a few feet from the edge of the Tower - a sliver of advantage and reach over the dozens of others seeking a piece of a spiritsail wreck. I came to a halt at Velese's side and watched helplessly as Jula edged away from us, torso swaying and bowing to absorb the waves that flowed through the cord.

"Jula!" I called, my words whipped away - all the emotion in them swirling into the mass of the current like dust thrown into rapids. "It's too far!"

She ignored me, her face screwed up with concentration as she slid her feet farther down the stay, her eyes focused on the long snake of the gold spirit. I knew what she was thinking. The story of Saleh's Youngest was her favorite. She was dreaming of laying a new chasuble of spun gold, a color never seen before in spirit threads, across Minister Rhenia's arms.

Gritting my teeth in frustration, I stuffed my spindles back under my belt and knelt down, hooking my foot about the corner of a crossbeam to brace myself as I grabbed hold of the stay. My fingers dug into the sticky material, as if they clutched at the clay-rich mud of one of Galee's salt marshes, and I pulled back, trying to dampen the waves rolling through the stay. I might as well tried to push the moon. Tears welled in my eyes as I watched Jula inch farther out, half-way to the sail now. She was going to fall. I knew it. All to catch a stupid gold spirit so she could impress the silly Minister and be her lover.

But she didn't fall. Hair dancing in the stream, dress pressing against her legs, she edged out to within a pace of the spirit and came to halt. For the longest time she stood there, riding the rhythm of the stay, her spindles gently tilting to balance herself. Finally, one of them rose up, countering her balance as she lowered the knob of the other into the cloud of the glowing amber and gave it a quick twist - a flick of the wrist - the feint of a fencer - the first jerk of a whisk.

It was masterfully done. Pieces of the gold spirit's essence followed the swirl of the spindle's knob, aligning one behind another, forming an inert thread that twisted about the spindle and cinched tight. When Jula pulled back, lifting the spindle in a wide arc, the newly formed thread dragged the spirit with it - off the stay and up into the air. And then my sister Jula stood on a swaying stay, plunged her other spindle into a gold spirit, and started to spin it.

For those of you who have never climbed the Towers and spun spirits, I can only describe the action as like folding molten metal, liquid candy or glass. It takes practice. I bobbled and lost the first dozen spirits I tried to catch. You have to swirl the knob of the spindles just right, and change the speed and angles as the threads start to form and congeal about the knobs. And it always takes longer than you think - you have to stir and stir at that thing, all above your head, until your forearms and shoulders are screaming with pain and begging to be let down. But you can't stop - or the spirit will unravel and dissolve into the spiritstream - and all the time the weight on your spindles is getting heavier and heavier as the spirit grows inert and takes bodily form.

And Jula had to deal with balancing on the stay while she did all this. Twice, she stopped her twirling of the knobs while she caught her balance, and each time the gold threads about her spindles wavered and tugged, a golden fog leaking from the mass as they tried to slip free. And both times she cried out in frustration, seizing her balance desperately as she returned her concentration to spinning.

She had always been a speedy spinner. I am not boasting when I say I don't think there would have been another in the village who could have done it. I certainly couldn't. The cloudiness of the spirit stretched and aligned, threads formed, and a oval of the clearest, most vibrant amber took shape about Jula's spindles. And still she spun, strengthening the strings, making sure none of the spirit remained in its chaotic, active state.

That's when she fell.

It was so quick my cry was hitched short by my gasp. Upturned from below, she cartwheeled into the stream, her hair flying about her as she flowed away, down the line of the stay. But even as my scream gathered in my throat, her arm jerked with a throw, and one of the spindles flew downward and about the sticky surface of the stay. The gold threads went with it, twisting and tangling with the spindle and cinching tight. Jula jerked to a halt, both hands clasped about the other spindle as her feet swayed in the spiritstream's current behind her, a river of gold thread the only thing holding her from flying away.

After all my earlier hesitation, it amazed me how quickly I ran down that stay. Dropping down to my full length by her spindle, I grabbed hold of the stay with an arm and reached down with the other. Gold threads glowed before me, wavering and tossing Jula about, but they were too long for just my arm and spindle to reach past. Cursing, I twisted my legs about the stay to brace myself, pressed my cheek against the sticky coldness of it, and reached for the gold threads with my spindles. They looked smooth and slick - not a shadow of a fogginess about them. But I couldn't be sure - Jula had not been done spinning the spirit entirely. Some of it might still be alive, and to touch a live spirit with your own skin – well, I had my mother's example to know what happened then.

The amber river draped over the black swampwood of my spindles, smooth and glossy, and I started to roll my arms as if I were working the pedal gears of the village well's crank. The stay bounced and tossed me, and my arms ached with the pull of Jula's weight, but still I rolled that priceless gold thread, dragging her closer to me, one small length at a time.

I could see the tears on her face as she came close, riding across her cheekbones and flicking off to disappear into the cobalt void. "Johana -" The skin about her eyes crinkled as terror overcame her. Her hands were slipping on their grip on the spindle. I could see it.

I hesitated, just an instant, and then dropped my spindles, seizing the threads themselves to pull with all my strength left in my aching limbs. Pinpricks like the first drops of a winter rainstorm danced across my palms and forearms, but I paid it no more heed than a man escaping a fire feels the flames. My hand clasped about the hard surface of her spindle, and then her wrist. I had her.

She crawled up me to get to the stay and curled her limbs about it, weeping helplessly as she tried to control her sobs.

"Come on." I pulled at her sleeve.

She looked up, her chin quivering as she stared into my eyes.

"I'm all right," I said. "You finished the spinning. We need to get you off this tower."

Jula nodded, her face going numb of feeling. Without a word, she turned and unwound her spindle from the stay and dropped it. The ribbon of gold thread swept away, swimming through the current like a snake, all four of our spindles still tangled within it, until is disappeared into the cobalt void.

Neither of us spoke, nor watched it go too carefully to see if it started to unravel or not.

I don't remember much about the climb down. No one had directly witnessed our ordeal. Velese had abandoned us to seek easier fare when the gold spirit had gone beyond her reach, and most everyone else was still on the hunt as we made our painful way down Tower Fair's sides alone. When we crawled shaking and spindle-less off the lowest beams at last, only two other spinners had returned to the plaza, their catches of gray and blue thread thrown down on the emerald grass for Minister Rhenia to inspect. A crowd of villagers stood beyond.

Jula burst into new tears when her feet reached the grass, and Minister Rhenia ran over, reaching out to take hold of her arms. Yet, an inch from Jula's skin, her hands stopped.

I froze.

A hazy gold lit Minister Rhenia's palms, reflecting off Jula's dark skin. The minister studied it for a moment, and then withdrew her hands, her dark eyes going flat.

I opened my mouth, but no words came. I had never known that one could spread a spirit's infection with just a touch. I had thought, if it happened - I would simply leave Jula and climb back up the Tower - like my mother had, all those years ago, when she realized the spinning she had taken off her spindles had not been done after all.

Tears streamed over Jula's cheeks. "I wanted to give it to you." She hiccupped between her sobs, her voice scraped raw. "To you."

Minister Rhenia bit down on her lip, her eyes flicking side to side as the other villagers looked up curiously, apprehension on their faces.

"You must go back up."

Jula's face crinkled. "No. No, I can't. Please."

A couple of the villagers came forward, but Minister Rhenia had raised her arms, cautioning them back. "Don't touch her! Johana, back away."

"But - "

"Do as I say!"

To this day, I am haunted by the fact I obeyed. I like to think I thought Minister Rhenia realized we had both brought a live spirit down to the Master's world with us. That if we refused to go willingly back up into the spiritstream and jump to our deaths, they would give us the mercy sentence of the others. A sleeping draught, strangulation, and an interment on the heights of Tower West.

I didn't expect Minister Rhenia to kill her right there. Draw her carving knife and slash her throat. Jula didn't either. Her eyes went wide with startled surprise as her weight sagged, her last sight before she collapsed her own blood soaking into the red chasuble.

Minister Rhenia lowered her knife, a shiver going through her before she looked at me. "I'm sorry, Johana," she whispered, low enough such that only I could hear. "You must understand, we cannot risk the spirits spreading. It would destroy us, just like those who built these towers." She reached a hand out to me. "It is all right. The blood does not spread it."

Whether she truly thought the grip of her blood-stained fingers would give me comfort, or she intended to check if I needed the knife, too, I will never know. Over the stone wall and down the road I fled, toward the harbor where the merchants dwelled, my sister's blood on my dress and my shadow edged with the faintest glow of gold.

The End

Story copyright Sharon E. Woods, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com