Before the wonderbird came, nobody had ever spoken to the mountain. She rose proud and lonely out of the sea, slopes too rocky to grow anything but squat junipers and tenacious mosses. The mountain did not have dreams or worries. Year after year, water and wind gnawed at her body.
The wonderbird came at night, fast as a shooting star and more luminous. No bird had ever touched the mountain before; she rose too far from migratory paths. But the wonderbird alighted on her southern slope and put his bright gold head under a wing to rest. And the mountain felt, watching him, a stirring of rocks deep within.
So for the very first time, she asked a question. The sea breeze whistled her words through a narrow gorge: “Where do you come from, bird?”
“There is a land beyond the sea,” the bird said, “mountainous and wild with woods, and beyond the mountains there is a city, bright with limestone and wonderbirds. That is where I come from.”
After that, the wonderbird flew into the night. But inside the mountain, the stirring grew. Every wisp of steam reminded her of birds; every cloud had the shape of white towers. She craved to see other mountains, to move across wild lands, and no longer were the sea and skies enough. She thought and imagined and yearned until she could no longer be still. She would journey to the city of wonderbirds.
It is no easy feat for a mountain to travel. When she first tried to roll her boulders into the sea, she caused an avalanche. The sea mocked her, roiling happily below. “You are rooted in place,” whispered the waves, “and only we can carry you away, bit by bit.”
“You’re right,” said the mountain in the voice of an easterly wind. And as the waves lapped at her foundations, cutting and smoothing and stealing away, the mountain searched for the parts of her that drifted in the water. Like an old pain stirring, she became aware of the stones that had fallen from her slopes and lay deceptively under the sea. She found herself in the pebbles tumbled by currents and in the seabed strewn with starfish and sand dollars. It hurt to become small and scattered, cut off from her roots, all around the brown haze of water. But only a small, light thing can move; and so she went away with the sea.
She traveled for a long time. The water carried her to and fro, here and there and everywhere. The mountain almost forgot who she was, until one day a small piece of her floated close to the surface, close enough for a glint of sunlight to reach. Her body, scattered across the sea, shuddered with memory. A bright gold bird; a light soft touch. There is a land beyond the sea.
The mountain pushed hard into the current that would carry her to land. She let the tide roll her onto the beach, all grit and gravel and sea glass; then she moved with the sea breeze into the reeds and through the marshes, collecting mud and moss, fashioning herself a new body. Through the woods she climbed like a wave, her spine crested with pine needles, her underbelly a tangle of roots, ever toward the mountains that rose watery-blue in the distance. But when she reached them, they did not recognize her as one of their own. For all she clawed a space between them and clung to their craggy slopes, they shared no language.
Yet the mountain stayed. She rested and waited, and even as the long years churned, she never forgot what she’d come for. Beyond the mountains, there is a city.
Every spring, students, soldiers, traders and builders crossed the rocky passes into the plains of the White City. When they made camp near her, the mountain listened to the stories they told by the fire. She made a plan. It would be harder than anything she’d done before and would take a long time, but the mountain had nothing if not patience. Day after day, she coaxed the shards of her body into a core of limestone and shale until travelers from the White City noticed, from a distance, the light and shadow playing together like the facets of a gemstone.
It hurt when they opened the quarry, of course it did, but the mountain had expected it. Everything hurt since she’d left home. The hammers and chisels pounded like a heartbeat inside her. She’d never known what it was to have a heart, but the wonderbird, she thought, must have one; so that every thud, every split, every chunk of stone hauled onto a cart brought her closer to him.
When the cart, piled high with rock, rolled away, the mountain went with it. On the outskirts of the city, the cart stopped so that the stone could be made into blocks. Some of it cut and smoothed; some crushed and mixed; all of it painful and strange to the mountain, who had remade herself countless times, yet none so hard, so unnatural. She felt exposed by the square, polished stones, her very core bared for all to see.
Yet when the gates of the White City opened to admit her, all was forgotten.
The streets rumbled with color, frantic and fast like mountain streams, full of small and self-important life, of rats and people and carts and dogs, of fruit and statues and lime trees and music. White towers rose in the distance, limestone and cloud meeting in a brightness that filled the mountain with longing. Stone by stone, she was laid in a wall around a garden of bright yellows and reds, with four little towers at each corner and a dandelion-shaped fountain in the center.
Before the wall was finished, a bird came to rest on the white stone. The bird was not gold but dirty-brown and small; her eyes were not bright but beady-black. She ruffled her feathers and skipped along the wall. For a while, the mountain watched and wondered.
“It’s you,” the mountain said at last, with the voice of beetles scraping across stone. “You’re the wonderbird. I’ve found you at last. You’ve changed, it’s true, but so have I.”
The bird pecked at the stone. “We’ve heard tell of wonderbirds, oh yes. In books and songs, in fairy tales. There are none here, and if there ever were any, none are left. What kind of stone are you, anyway?”
The mountain could not bear to say her own name, so she asked instead for the bird’s.
“I am sparrow,” the bird said. She chirped happily, “Sparrow sparrow sparrow,” and the mountain could not help but feel a pang of envy. It all seemed so simple for the bird.
Soon, the wall around the garden was finished. The city around it hummed and stank and worked tirelessly, filling with trucks and trains and glass towers. The mountain watched people haggle and steal and feed each other; and when it got too much, she turned and watched the garden grow, seed to flower to seed again. For the first time, she felt the weight of years.
But one spring evening, at golden hour, when the clouds half-covered the sun just right, and a sparrow swooped down to catch a worm, something happened. Sunlight set ablaze the little bird, contoured it in gold, and for a moment the sparrow seemed to be the only thing holding the fabric of the sky together. “Wonderbird,” the mountain whispered. “You are here, after all.”
The mountain felt her stone settle, as though some pocket of air underneath had burst and filled with soil.
As the birds of the city returned from their overwinter travels, the mountain listened to their stories. “There is a sea beyond the land,” they said, “and all the way to the horizon there is nothing but water, and even birds don’t dare to cross that endless sky.”
A familiar restlessness stirred within the mountain. Slowly, she began to see her garden as a place she would one day miss. And without knowing what for, she waited.
When an earthquake shook the city, the stones in the wall around the garden shifted and rolled away, and the mountain rolled away with them.
Would she travel to the sea, to find the folds deep under the seabed that had been her home and rise again where she’d once stood? Or would she head deeper inland, toward foreign cities and mountains so unlike her that they’d never recognize her as their kin?
Just then, the mountain found it did not matter. Though her stones broke into ever smaller pieces and the wind blew them to and fro, she did not lose her way. “Mountain,” she chanted in a gravelly voice, tumbling down the walls of a steep ravine. “Mountain mountain mountain,” and the word echoed with new meanings.
Wherever she was going, the mountain knew there would be wonderbirds.
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