The Daughter Who Loved the Water

In the high days of Yan Emperor, when the world was still new and the mountains had not yet learned their names, there lived a young princess called Nüwa. She was the emperor's only daughter. He loved her the way men love the one bright thing in a dark house. Gardens, birds, all the soft things that belong to princesses, he gave her. Nüwa cared for none of them.

What she loved was the Eastern Sea. It lay to the east of her father's parks, a great bright plain of water that ran to the edge of the sky. At dawn she would walk down to the shore alone, lift her skirts, and listen. The farmers of the coast were afraid of the water. They had seen it take men. The princess was not afraid. To her it was only the sea. And the sea sang.

She learned its moods the way a girl learns the moods of a friend. She knew when it was quiet, when it was angry, what the color of its water meant. When it was calm she waded in, gathered the shells it left, brought them home by the handful. Her father would say, Nüwa, the sea is not your friend; it has no heart. And she would laugh and say, it has a voice, and I understand it.

She was, the stories say, a child of great will. Once she set her mind on a thing, she did not turn from it. Like a young tree that has found the sun. It grows toward it no matter what the wind does. Her father had ruled men and provinces, and he could not turn her from what she loved. He watched her go down to the shore every morning. He worried. He said nothing.

The coast people told her stories of the sea. Beyond the horizon, they said, lay the home of dragons, the palaces of the sea-kings. The water was not water at all but a great living thing, older than the mountains, that had swallowed more lives than any empire. Nüwa listened to all of it. She did not disbelieve them. She simply did not care.

One morning, when the wind was from the east and the water was gray and restless, she said she would go out upon it. Her attendants begged her not to. The fishermen had drawn their boats up on the beach, saying the sea was in a temper. But Nüwa had made up her mind. She took a small boat. She had always preferred the small ones, because they answered to her hand. She pushed off alone.

The water took her out quickly. The shore, which she had watched from the beach a thousand times, grew small. The hills of her father's parks fell away. She was alone on a great gray plain. The sky and the water met, and there was no telling them apart. She was not afraid. She was happy, the way a girl is happy when she is at last where she has always wished to be.

Then the wind rose. It rose the way the sea rises when it has made up its mind, all at once, without asking leave. A wave came. Not a large one, by the sea's own measure, but larger than the little boat. It lifted the boat and overturned it. The princess, who had never learned to be afraid of water, went down into the gray, cold dark. She did not come up again.