The Soul Will Not Sink

The water closed over her. Cold. Dark. It moved her this way and that, the way a child moves a broken toy. When she was small, standing on the shore, she had thought the sea sang. Now she heard it up close. The song had no words. No pity. Just a vast, indifferent thing, and she was a small, warm thing inside it.

She did not want to die. This is the heart of the story: she did not want to die. She was young. She had loved the sea, and the sea had not loved her back. She was being taken down into the dark, and she could not understand why. Her father would be waiting at home. Her shells would still be on the sand where she had left them. She would not come back.

The water filled her lungs. The light that had come down from the surface, a pale trembling pillar, faded to nothing. She felt herself go heavy, felt herself sink. The last thing she knew was rage. Not fear. Rage, bright and hot, in the cold dark. I came to love you, she thought. I did not come to fight. And you have taken me for no reason.

But the sea does not answer. It never has. It receives what it receives, moves on, does not remember. Nüwa, the daughter of an emperor, sank to the bottom like any other drowning thing. The water closed above her. The surface was as calm as it had been before.

Her father waited. When the storm passed, he sent boats out. They rowed the gray water until their arms gave out, and came back with nothing. They found her boat, overturned, a mile from shore. They found her shells, still on the sand where she had laid them. Her they did not find. The emperor, who had ruled men and provinces, sat down on the beach and wept. The sea did not stop for him, either.

That should have been the end. It is the end of every other story. A girl goes down. The sea takes her. The father mourns. The world goes on. But Nüwa's will, strong in life, would not let go in death. It would not accept the dark. It turned itself over in the deep. It refused to be still.

They say her spirit, bright and stubborn as it was, would not dissolve. It clung to the shore. To the shells. To the bright morning she had pushed off alone. Clung so hard the water itself could not hold it. Something came together out of her refusal. Not a girl, not a ghost. A small, living thing, made of anger and of memory.

It rose from the water. Rose on wings, wet and beating, flew up over the gray sea, back toward the shore. It was a bird. Small, dark, with a white head, red feet, a beak of coral. It flew to the nearest rock, stood there, shook the water from its feathers, and cried out. The cry was its name: jing wei, jing wei, jing wei.

It was Nüwa. But not Nüwa any longer. The princess who had loved the sea had been taken by it, and the sea had given her back in a shape that could not drown. She looked out over the water that had killed her. And at last she knew what she had come there to do.