The Rock and the First Flight

The rock was small and black, and it stood out of the water a mile from the shore. It was all Jingwei had. She came to herself there, wet and beating her wings, and she did not, at first, understand what she was.

She remembered being a girl. She remembered her father's hall, and the shells she had gathered, and the morning she had pushed off alone. She remembered the cold water closing over her, and the rage. All of that was still in her. But the body that held it was not a girl's body. It was a bird's: small, and light, with wings that would not stop trembling.

She cried out, and the cry was not a girl's cry. It was the same word, over and over: jing wei, jing wei. It was her name. She had half-forgotten that she had ever had a name, in the way one forgets a dream. The bird remembered it, and called it out across the water, as though calling back to the girl she had been.

Her father came to the shore. The courtiers, the villagers, all came. They had seen the bird rise from the water, and they pointed, and they said that it was the princess, returned. Yan Emperor walked the beach for days, calling her name, and the bird answered him from the rock, jing wei, jing wei. But he could not reach her, and she could not come to him.

She watched him go. She did not blame him. She understood that he was old, and that she was now a thing he could not hold. What she did not understand, at first, was what she was to do. She sat on the rock, and the sun rose and set, and she was a bird, and the sea was all around her, and she had no purpose.

Then, on the third morning, she understood. She looked at the water that had killed her, and the rage she had carried down into the dark rose up in her again, hotter than before. You took me, she thought. You took me for no reason. I will not let you keep what you took.

She flew inland. Her wings were weak at first, and she fell more than once, but she found her way to the mountain, and she found the dead tree at the treeline, and she chose a twig — small, dry, no bigger than her claw. She took it in her beak. It was absurd, and she knew it was absurd, and she flew back toward the sea anyway.

The first twig was nothing. It fell from her beak and sank, and the water closed over it without a sound. A less stubborn thing would have stopped. Jingwei did not stop. She flew back to the tree, and chose another, and dropped it, and chose another, and dropped it. The sun moved over the water, and she understood that she had chosen a labor without end.

That was the beginning. The rock was her home. The tree was her quarry. The sea was her enemy. Between them she would fly, for as long as the bird in her would hold together, dropping one small thing at a time into the vast indifferent water.