Schooling
Pema and Dorje in the temple as kids.
He became Dorje. They told him he was strong and he felt proud. So when it came to do the water duty, the boy volunteered. "But you are still young and small." They said. "But I'm strong." He replied proudly. He learned a lesson of keeping his mouth shut when he carried the water up the steps.
That is how Dorje managed to sit down during his lessons. Being taught required and awful amount of sitting. The boy was not used to that. His legs would move on their own and the boy would not let them because he was expected to sit still and listen.
Then they observed the signs. Each sign meant something and he was learning how to read them. There were so many, but he memorized them quickly. He was told he was smart and he was given a chalk and a board to practise writing. The boy was proud of himself.
It was good that teachings in the temple also involved practising their body movements. Dorje liked that a lot. He always strived to do it with all his strength, he needed the way to blow his steam to be able to sit for the rest of the day, but he was not aware of that.
"Each move should be measured and to the point." The teacher instructed. Dorje was often corrected, his moves were too fast, gone too far, his hands and feet were often in the wrong place, and the boy did not like the physical exercise so much.
But then he had chores and other activities. Maintaining a temple was a lot of physical work and he loved it. He ventured out whenever an opportunity arose, weather it was to bring food or other supplies and he even carried water just to go out from the building.
Of course, that was on the condition that he always returned. The boy wanted to continue his studies and he began to enjoy the teachings more and more. As few winters passed, he was finally given more ambitious tasks in the physical exercises and he was better at that too.
Monks often gave him tasks when something on the temple had to be fixed. And that happened rather often. Sometimes there was a storm and they had to climb the walls and repair what was damaged. Sometimes there were just simple cracks to be filled.
Dorje loved the temple. It was much sturdier building than the tent he used to live in. Although the tent survived harsh weather and many storms due to its flexibility and provided warmth and shelter from the elements, the temple was something different.
The space inside looked vast to the boy, there were huge halls where they would eat, learn their lessons, chant, sing, cook, clean themselves. Then there were different chambers where they slept. It was large and domestic at the same time.
There were not many students in the temple. The monks were somehow vague about the destiny of each of their students that had left the temple. Some of them said they were going to return to their families after six years of schooling. Some of them left for other purposes.
Whenever he had some free time, Dorje liked to sneak around the temple. He loved it when he found some space previously unknown to him. There were niches hidden behind thick tapestries, there were passages that lead to nowhere and there were hidden chambers.
Dorje became rather good at sneaking around, mostly because he was punished when he was caught, so he hid well whenever he heard some steps passing and ran away back to the quarters where he was supposed to be.
That day he venutred up the stairs again. He seldom did it but that day there was literally no one of the older monks around. He already remembered which door led to a storage and which to a chamber. He did not want to accidentaly go and hide in a chamber if someone walked around.
"I am not giving Dorje for a mere wielder." A woman spoke. Dorje recognized the tone and the voice. That was Dolma, the old woman monk who was always rather harsh. "I wanted to raise him as a guardian."
"He would be an excellent guardian." The boy heard when Tenzin agreed. "But not of a mere box." The man continued. There was a pregnant pause. Dorje wandered what boxes needed to be guarded. "I believe we got ourselves a new Guardian of the Temple."
"Well, that is settled then." Dolma replied flatly. The boy sneaked away. This was not the first time that he spied on the two old monks, but this was the first time that he overheard they intended to keep someone in the temple for longer than six years.
It took time to get used to a new name, new people and the life of constant travelling. They called her Pema and for a few months they have been doing nothing but moving around. Sometimes the monk that lead her did some strange business deals, but Pema did not know what was their purpose.
The fact that she spoke two languages while her companions did not speak one of them was only making it harder for her. She picked up a few words they used and she started to connect them to the signs they used. Everything was different, but she was determined to learn their lanugage.
There was a letter received one day, that nobody knew how to read. Pema looked at it once and she recognized the language of her father. She read it out loud, but nobody who travelled with her understood a single word she uttered. She was desperate, she repeated and repeated, she followed the text with her index finger and read out the text word for word.
Then she tried to explain in the language of her mother, how the king of France was defeated and how the land they travelled was now contested by another king, and another queen. She had no idea where France was, save it was the country where her father was born.
One of her compainons knew a few words of her mothers language and was explaining something to the rest of the group. Everyone nodded at her. They let her keep the letter. She read it over and over. Then one of her compainons started to teach her the language they spoke.
With heach word, the woman would draw a mark in the soil they waled on and Pema would repeat that mark. She was slowly learning the signs, not just the expressions. And she was feeling usefull. If she learned one more language it would be easier for her to find a job like her mother.
Then they stumbled upon a group of soldiers that spoke the language of her mother. They demanded food and money. Those few monks did not understand their requests and the young boy slightly older than her who did was too scared to response.
Pema stood her ground and looked at the soldier determinedly. The soldiers ignored her at first because she was just a little girl. Then she told them they had no money nor food to spare and she explained that she was a daguter of a French soldier.
They somehow concluded that French army offciers might be after them if they persisted with their robbery and moved on. Later she heard of betrayal and deserters and later she understood what those men were doing.
After that, the whole group decided it was really important to teach the girl so speak, read and write their signs. She had a lecture at every meal, otherwise they were just walking along muddy paths, through forrests, over mountains and finally over high plains.
It was starting to become cold and they got her new clothes that was keeping her warm. There were only four of them at the time because they left the rest of the group at a temple in some city. They continued to teach her as they walked.
She understood that she was going to a temple where they trained a special kind of monks. She was going to go to school. In that school they were teaching children like her how to read and write, how to fight and how to do many other different things.
Then they told her that they also trained and taught people how to deal with magical beings like that dragon she saw that night in the battle. She would learn how to make a dragon and how to become one. They told her many things that scared her.
But Pema was not scared of many things. Now that she was away from her mother and her father had died, she did not have too many things to be scared of. One of the monks was a woman the age of her mother and she spent the most time teaching while they were walking.
It was cold. Sometimes it was too cold to do anything. Sometimes it was too cold to sleep in the flimsy tent they had. The woman wrapped the girl close to keep her warm. Pema liked the woman, she reminded the girl of her mother.
"Don't get too attached to her." A man scolded. "You know you'll have to leave her in the temple and go to your next assignment." And Pema could feel that the woman was just holding her closer. "She has to stay for the complete training, you already told her too much."
"I will stay in the temple for as long as they let me." The woman told Pema. "But my job is to travel the world and your job will be to stay in the temple and learn. At least for a while." That made Pema happy. She wanted to live in one place after all of that travelling.
The next morning Pema learned what was snow. Everything was white. It was hard to look because everything was so bright. Pema looked at the snow and how it glowed in the sunlight and thought about all those tales of riches and gold. She saw gold before. Snow was shining brighter.
They walked that day for much longer than usual. On other days they would stop an hour before sunset to put up a tent and cook some food. But that day they walked and walked, the sun had set, but the moon was high and lit up the way.
Then she had to climb some steps. It was late, it was dark and she was tired. But she made it all the way up. Then they lead her into a building. She was amazed at the scene but too tired to explore. She was given warm tea and a bowl of warm food.
Dorje was excited to hear that the masters had returned from their journey, they were through some experience that was kept a secret, and due to that, they brought with them a girl. She was smaller than him, and looked exhausted, because she travelled from such great distance.
He brought her food, he tried to listen to the story and he watched her eat. He barely resisted the urge to hold her and keep her safe and worm. He knew that something had happened to her and the masters decided to keep her and bring her to the temple.
She probably fell asleep before she finished her food. Someone carried her away and set her to sleep. The next morning, she woke up surrounded by other students and she was able to say her name, age, and when she arrived.
Pema was asked to demonstrate her knowledge, she was able to read and write and speak in several languages. Dorje was amazed. This girl had just arrived and she already had more skills in that department than many of his fellow students, him included.
Dorje and Pema made almost instant friends. He knew each and every corner in the temple and she wanted to explore all of them. She knew how to read and write in many languages and she was able to draw so they soon gave her to copy some books.
The two of them studied the books together and then ventured to explore the temple and its surroundings together. The temple teachers let her skip a few years of classes because she was already reading and writing. But there were plenty of areas where she needed more teaching.
She needed to practise her fighting skills far more than other students in her group. But Dorje was eager to help out even outside of the schedule of their regular exercises. That was how she slowly caught up and started to become better and better.
Then, there was history and while the monks chanted their verses, Pema had a system of her own.
Dorje preferred to listen to her stories about the history of the world and the countries and the kings from afar, but he always offered to talk to her about their local stories, weather they were actual history of mere legends and stories told late in the evening by the fire.
However, a day had arrived when most of their group was sent home. The only two left in training were Pema and Dorje. That day they were taken onto a walk and learned about magical creatures, heroes and villains, akuma and other monsters. And then Dorje learned they were real.
That was the first time Pema was allowed to talk about the battle she witnessed that night, about the dragon, the bracelet, the feather, and two heroes who spoke the language of her father, they were Ladybug and Chat Noir.
That evening they returned to the temple through the cold blizzard. The tea and food warmed them up a little and they were allowed to sleep on a carpet by the fire to keep warm during the cold night and recover from a long walk and lesson in the cold weather outside.
But they never slept, Dorje already knew that the temple was magic itself as well as that it had some kind of power over the magic of some magical beings that gave magical powers to otherwise human beings and that wielders of those powers were trained in the temple.
Pema saw those heroes, but she did not know who they were, and Dorje never met such kids in the temple, so they talked all night about who it was and where did they come from, about the villain who attacked the temple that Pema visited and from all the tales that Dorje ever heard.
Dorje was glad that he was kept in the temple to learn about the magic, to protect it and its inhabitants from all sorts of evil that could haunt it from the outside world. The same way as the old walls of the building were protecting the two from the harsh weather outside.
Pema already saw the temple as her home. She lost all contact with her family long ago, she had no other place to go to and no one to miss. Her mother probably married again if she was still alive and her village would not want her back. She wanted to stay there in the temple and make it her home for life.