Hidden Monastery Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  the

  Hidden

  Monastery

  The Abbot said, ‘Peng is so powerful he can fill up the whole sky,

  and yet shrink so small he can sit on a blade of grass

  without it bending under his weight.’

  ‘No creature on earth can do that!’ said Jax.

  ‘But Peng is not from this world,’ the Abbot replied.

  From the moment Peng fell from the stars as a tiny young creature, he and Jax have been connected. But it is not until twelve years later, when Jax stumbles across a mysterious monastery hidden deep in an ancient rainforest park, that he begins to discover his destiny – and what it means to be a Peng Master…

  Also by Gabrielle Wang

  The Garden of Empress Cassia

  The Pearl of Tiger Bay

  the

  Hidden

  Monastery

  Gabrielle Wang

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

  250 Camberwell Road

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada)

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  Toronto ON M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd

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  Penguin Group (NZ)

  Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd, 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Text copyright © Gabrielle Wang, 2006

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication

  may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission

  of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.puffin.com.au

  9781742281469

  Acknowledgements

  The Australia Council for their generous support in funding this book. Julie Watts for her faith. Christine Alesich for her insightful editing. Marina Messiha for a beautiful cover. Thank you also to those who have helped along the way – Kirsty Murray, Wei Wei Qian, Wendy and Paul Bennett and Olivia and Lena Handrinos. And to my family – Mabel Wang, Steve Clavey, Lei Lei and Ren for their constant flow of ideas and involvement in the adventure.

  To Steve

  and to three inspirational school teachers that have touched my life –

  Esta de Fossard, Mrs E McPhee and Grant Allen.

  Contents

  Bubble of Life

  Jax’s Birthmark

  My Dog Ruby

  The Black Abyss

  Inside Your World Inside Mine

  A Small Dog’s Life

  Dr Rainwild

  The Deep Sea Storm

  Whispering Cloud

  Into Another World

  The Monster in the Lake

  The Monster on Two Legs

  Drums, Dragons and Hungry Ghosts

  Whispering Cloud Monastery

  Flying High

  In the Courtyard of Imaginings

  The Abbot’s Chamber

  A Whoosh in the Dark

  A Shadow Leaves the Monastery

  The Fighting Moves of Gongfu

  A Stranger at the Gate

  Crunching Cockroaches

  The Mark Comes Alive

  The Silver Wind

  The Peng Master

  Leaving the Monastery

  The Stench from the Outside

  The Peng

  A Hole in the Magic

  Land of the Immortals

  The Fox’s Den

  Going Home

  In the dark deep stillness of the North

  Swims a creature.

  Huge – no one knows how huge!

  Its name is Kun.

  Changing form, the creature flies.

  Its name, now, is Peng.

  Peng’s shoulders are broad – no one knows how broad!

  Flying, his wings cover the sky like clouds.

  When Peng ascends, he stirs up the waters

  For three thousand miles around.

  Spirals upward – a whirlwind

  Which lifts him

  Ninety thousand miles high.

  Wheeling in majesty, Peng turns and heads South.

  Only azure sky above, clouds and dark sea below,

  Borne by the wind for six months,

  He comes to rest

  In the Lake of Heaven.

  Zhuang Zi, c. 256 BC.

  Bubble of Life

  A shiny black orb, no bigger than a pea, slipped through a hole in the sky. A tiny bubble of life – a star seed. Who knows where it came from?

  The little creature inside the orb had been sleeping comfortably, his nose buried under his tail, humming to the purr of his own heartbeat. Pat di pat, pat di pat, pat di pat. It was a song he knew well. But now the soft outer shell felt tight against his skin. As if he didn’t belong inside it any more. He wriggled his body and arched his back.

  Peng… Peng… The soothing voice of the wind sang his name, vibrating the membrane like a drum.

  The creature stopped wriggling. His eyes shone like green emeralds.

  It is time, the wind sang. Reach out to me.

  Peng obeyed, extending his two front legs as far as they could go.

  Little by little, the membrane began to stretch and stretch until it was almost invisible. Then, with a small flick of his claws, he pierced the outer shell. The orb split in two.

  As a sudden rush of cool air washed over Peng’s body, he felt a wondrous sense of freedom. But this feeling lasted only a few seconds, for then he began to fall. Peng tumbled over and over. The sky and sea became one spinning whirl around him. In desperation, he kicked his legs and flapped his tail. But he was still too young to fly.

  Soaring high above, the keen eyes of a hawk spotted the small creature falling through the sky. She had never seen anything like it in her territory before. But she could sense the flesh on its bones. A tasty treat for my two young’uns, she thought.

  The hawk set Peng in her sights and sped towards him, her tawny wings outstretched, her tail feathers spread like a fan behind her. Closer and closer she came. Steady… steady… the talons of one foot flexed, ready to catch the creature in mid-flight.

  But Peng had seen the menacing shadow pass overhead. Instinctively he thrashed his legs and lashed out with his tail. The lacy mane that ran down his back lifted, and for a moment he began to fly. The hawk missed her mark, talons closing around thin air. She tried again, hovering, adjusting her position, focussing her vision. But the wind was also watching. With invisible fingers, it lifted Peng high on its shoulders. The hawk could only watch as the little creature was carried far away on an upwa
rd spiral of wind.

  In a city in China, a mother, her black hair tied back with a ribbon of gold, stood up from her bed and brought her baby to the window. His name was Mingzi. The fresh air might calm his unsettled spirit, she thought. He had cried all night – his stomach full of wind, poor thing.

  The mother hummed a soft lullaby… ‘he ya, hey ya,’ she sang.

  As she rocked from side to side, she watched the neighbourhood children playing ping-pong on a concrete table out on the street.

  I wonder what my little Mingzi’s future will be, she thought, bending down and kissing him gently on the forehead. A breeze blew against her face. It smelt of the sea. She twirled a loose strand of hair and hooked it behind her ear.

  ‘He ya, hey ya…’ The baby stopped crying.

  As the mother glanced down, she saw a tiny creature land on the palm of her baby’s hand. It looked like a small lizard. Mingzi cooed sweetly.

  Peng in turn felt the warmth of the child’s touch. This is where I surely belong, he thought. He relaxed his body and let it sink into the baby’s palm.

  But at that moment, the mother lifted Mingzi’s hand to her lips and gently blew Peng out of the window where the wind was hovering, waiting again to take him away. For even though the boy and the creature were destined to be together, it was not yet time for them to meet.

  The wind carried Peng across the city, where chimneys belched out thick clouds of black smoke, to a wide brown river, then out to the open sea. The wind was playful, lifting him high, then dropping him suddenly, only to pick him up again. It swirled Peng around and around until his head was dizzy and his stomach was turned upside down. And then, like a fickle friend, it deserted him.

  To his horror, Peng found himself falling again. He tried kicking his legs and moving his mane, but gravity pulled him downwards. When he hit the water, the pain was like a thousand splinters piercing his body. What was this cold, wet fluid that pressed against his skin? Peng had no air left inside his lungs and no strength to fight. He was sinking fast. But then a miraculous thing happened. Two fan-shaped gills opened up on either side of his neck and immediately the pressure in his lungs eased. He took a small breath. Then another… and another. Yes. He was breathing underwater! It was as if Peng had always belonged to this watery world.

  But he was not yet out of danger. He was still sinking down into the darkness, where the Black Abyss lay waiting like a huge cavernous mouth.

  Jax’s Birthmark

  ‘Mingzi, qi lai, qi lai. Time to get up for school,’ Jax heard his mother call. The words came floating through the doorway, wrapped in smells of garlic and fried eggs.

  Jax groaned, drawing the covers tight over his head. He closed his eyes against the morning light, hoping to get back inside his dream. It was a wonderful dream. A winged beast had lifted him high in the air. Everything was tiny – the people, the houses, even the mountains. He found a dream trail and followed it in. Now he was looking down upon a golden pavilion floating on a bed of mist. Whoa… his legs were two long ribbons. He was a giant with his ears in the clouds and his feet on the ground…

  ‘Mingzi, qi lai, you’ll be late.’

  ‘I’m coming, Ma,’ he called out.

  Jax hadn’t always been the smallest boy in class, but he was this year. Everyone else was growing as if their legs were made of chewing gum, while his seemed to be made from dead lumps of wood. Sometimes he wondered if the birthmark on his palm was using up all of his growing power.

  This morning it was annoyingly itchy. Must be another storm coming, he thought, rubbing the mark vigorously. He held up his left hand and inspected it as he did every morning. It was an unusual mark as birthmarks go. But it had always been a part of him, like a nose or a thumb or a belly button.

  When Jax was a baby, the mark had been a soft pale pink, a little darker than the colour of his skin. It looked like a raspberry had been pressed into his palm. There were delicate little lines on it as well, as if someone had painted them with a tiny brush.

  As each year passed, Jax began to see in his palm a little creature with a head and a body and four legs. If he folded his fingers over, the creature would curl up as if it was going to sleep. Then, when he opened out his hand again, it would look like it was slowly waking up and stretching.

  Sometimes Jax would look up and see a fantastic cloud shaped like a tiger or a ship or a bird, slowly moving across the sky. Was that all the creature in his palm was? A changing shape in his imagination?

  Jax never told anyone what he saw in his mark. Not even his parents, or his sister, Mai, knew what it had become. Ever since that first day in grade one when Evelyn Foxcroft, a redhead with skinny white legs, pointed at it and yelled ‘Eeeuu!’, he had kept it a secret. Sometimes he wished he could peel it off like a fake tattoo and throw it away. And yet, even though he was so ashamed of his mark, a small part of him hoped that maybe it meant that he, Jaxson Wu, was special somehow.

  Jax had come to Australia from China with his parents and little sister Mai when he was seven years old. They had been a family then. That’s how Jax remembered it. All four of them used to ride on Ba’s bike. Mai in a bamboo seat attached to the handlebars, Jax across the middle bar, held safe between Ba’s arms. And Ma, sitting side-saddle on the back, clutching string bags of meat and vegetables. He remembered they used to laugh a lot, too. Laugh at Ma’s jokes and play and do things together. He felt different then. Like a whole boy. He wished he could feel like that again.

  Ma said they left China to make a better life for themselves, but Jax didn’t think so. Ba used to be an engineer back in China, and Ma was an accountant for the government. Now they worked in a sock factory, packing boxes. Ma worked in the factory in the daytime while Ba worked the same job at night. Sometimes Jax felt as if his parents were one long stretchy person that rotated in and out of his life. And somewhere along the way Ba had stopped talking to him. Was he disappointed because he saw his son as useless?

  There were many times when Jax wanted to show his father his birthmark. He wanted to ask him if he knew what it meant. And if he saw it changing, too, and why it itched so much when a storm was approaching. But they were like two shadows living between empty walls.

  When Ba had come home after his first day at work, he told Jax and Mai that his new name was going to be Robert, and Ma’s new name was Joy. The boss at the big factory decided to give them all new names because he said that their Chinese ones were too hard for him to remember. Jax thought his parents looked much more like their old names of Chang Li and Qing Ling, which meant hidden strength and clear spirit.

  Jax didn’t mind the new name he was given though. Jaxson Wu sounded kind of strong and definite. Not the wishy-washy sort of boy he thought himself to be.

  Jax heard the front door close as Ma left for work. He sighed. She never laughs or jokes any more, he thought. Reaching across the bed, he pulled down hard on the blind. It sprang to life then shot up, flapping around the top like a wounded bird.

  A fat green grasshopper sat on the foxtail palm on the other side of the glass. Its body was full and as thick as Jax’s thumb. ‘You beauty,’ he whispered, smiling. He held his breath until it sprang away, leaving the palm frond gracefully waving goodbye.

  Just then the door opened a crack and a little black nose appeared.

  ‘Hey, Ruby!’ Jax cried happily as a small black and white dog trotted up to his bed. She gazed at Jax with brown saucer eyes, her tail wagging so fast it was just a blur.

  ‘I know, you want your breakfast,’ he said.

  At the sound of the word breakfast, Ruby danced around in circles on her short little legs then scrabbled up onto the bed. Jax rubbed her ears gently and put his face against hers. ‘You’re the best dog in the world, Ruby,’ he said, looking deep into her eyes.

  After dressing for school, Jax walked down the hall to the kitchen while Ruby did her favourite trick – making figure eights in and out of his legs.

  ‘Hey Jax, we’re going on
a ’scursion to the ’quarium,’ Mai grinned as she sat at the kitchen table.

  Jax took a packet of dry doggy bits from the cupboard and poured some into a bowl for Ruby.

  ‘Miss Tingwell said there’s a water tunnel and giant sharks swim right over your head.’ Mai spoke through a mouthful of egg and her pigtails jiggled excitedly.

  ‘The aquarium’s awesome, Mai,’ said Jax, patting Ruby on the head and sitting down at the table. ‘When we went, Blanco dropped his mobile phone in the toilet and had to fish it out by hand.’

  ‘Eeeuuu… that’s ’sgusting. Did it still work?’ Mai giggled.

  ‘Yeah, but every time it rang it made funny gurgling noises.’

  They both laughed.

  Mai pushed her chair over to the sink and began to wash her dishes. ‘Hurry, Jax,’ she said, rinsing her plate and putting it in the rack to dry.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be ready before you are,’ said Jax, stuffing the whole fried egg into his mouth at once.

  ‘No, I’ll be ready first,’ Mai cried. She jumped off the stool and ran quickly to the bathroom.

  Five minutes later Jax stood by the front door. ‘You ready, Mai?’ he shouted.

  ‘Not fair,’ Mai mumbled through a mouthful of toothpaste froth. ‘Ooo idn’t ush your eeth.’

  ‘I brushed them last night,’ Jax chuckled.

  Mai soon came running to the front door to join him, her backpack swinging between her shoulders. ‘You cheated, Jax!’

  ‘Come on, you don’t want to be late, do you?’ he grinned.

  My Dog Ruby

  River School was surrounded by a forest of prickly plants. The founder, Mr Archie River, had brought the seedlings all the way from his home country of South Africa, in a box marked Euphorbia ingens. Some of the cacti had grown taller than the classrooms.

  Jax and Mai walked past the administration building where an empty flagpole stood. There used to be a flag attached to it, with the proud face of Mr River embroidered on its surface. But just last week, during a violent storm, the wind blew a gaping hole straight through the founder’s mouth, then grabbed the flag and ripped it off the pole. The children watched it sail across the schoolyard with the open-mouthed Archie looking as if he was crying out for help. They couldn’t stop laughing all week.