by Drawn Words
"Folks are calling it the Savior of Soles," said the boy with large patches on both knees of his well-worn pants. "You know, like on the shoes."
Ewen chuckled. Savior of Soles indeed. The three boys didn’t laugh along with Ewen and looked very serious, so he stifled his laughter. One of them was the painter, he guessed.
"It’s a good painting," Ewen said. "Just like the chalk one I’ve been keeping on the sidewalk near the square. Those funny shapes in the beard are a bit different, though. Do any of you lads know what those shapes are supposed to be?"
The redhead and the boy with the patches looked back and forth at each other and shrugged. "I dunno," said the third boy. "That’s just how the drawing goes, isn’t it?"
Ewen noticed a spot of paint on the boy’s sleeve and guessed he was the artist.
"Well, not really," Ewen said, digging into his sack to pull out the sketches he had made when he was first designing the trademark for his footwear. "This is my drawing, so I guess I should know how it goes. Here, take a look at these."
"Hey, that’s not right at all," said the boy with the paint-spotted clothing. "It doesn’t even have a halo."
"This is the original drawing," Ewen said. "The halo came later. Look closely at the shapes in the beard. That’s what’s wrong in your, er, the painting over there on the wall."
The boy studied Ewen’s drawing carefully, but the redheaded boy pulled a folded sheet of paper from a pocket and gave it to Ewen.
"This is what the face is supposed to look like, isn’t it?" asked the redhead.
Ewen examined the paper. It was his father’s face with the halo, faithfully copied in dark black ink, but the drawn words in the beard were all wrong. Whoever created the copy hadn’t realized the significance of his graceful shapes, and had substituted harsh, angular ones in their place.
"Where did you get this paper?" Ewen asked, refolding the paper and pocketing it.
"The rectory gives them out with free food," the redhead said. "Sometimes we go there when we’re hungry. We’re supposed to pray to the face on the paper, I think."
"Well, they’ve got it wrong," Ewen said. "The original shapes I drew mean something. Let me show you how to make them correctly."
Over the course of the next few hours, Ewen showed the three of them how to draw "Father, forgive me" in drawn words. He explained how he had created the shapes, going from fully fleshed drawings to stripped-down ones, and illustrated the transformation with a series of sketches on a sheet of paper. The boys were attentive and had little trouble understanding the concept and practicality of drawn words. Ewen cautioned them that it was "forbidden knowledge," which only made them even more interested in learning it. The boy with the paint-spotted clothing picked it up quickly and then began helping the others. Ewen and the boys became fast friends and traded other useful information, like good locations for begging and places where decent meals could be salvaged from the refuse cans.
"If you can draw a few little shapes to mean just about everything," said the redhead, "then are there drawn words for our names, too?"
Ewen learned their given names were Derek, Lachlan and Fergus, but rather than make up new shapes for them, he sketched the words for "red," "patch," and "painter" on individual scraps of paper and gave them to the boys. The three of them prized their written names, and began tracing the symbols in the air with their fingers, memorizing the shapes.
"Be careful about who you show these drawn words to," Ewen implored. "You could get into big trouble."
"Don’t worry about us," Patch said. "We can look out for ourselves."
Ewen said good-bye and went to his usual sidewalk spot happy over having made his first real friends since leaving home. Over the next few weeks he would see the drawn words for "Red," "Patch," "Painter," and "Father, forgive me," appear in charcoal, chalk and paint on numerous walls and buildings all over town. His protégés were seemingly everywhere, reveling in the conspicuous display of their marks and testing the limits of their rebelliousness. Ewen met with them often over the weeks, and at each meeting the boys would ask him what the drawn words were for various things and carefully copy the symbols that Ewen showed them.
Ewen, too, began scrawling words on the walls after the sun went down. Things like, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well," and "Words aren’t evil, men are." Ewen always signed his messages with the drawn word for his name.
Once, Ewen came across the chalked message on a wall, "The Savior of Soles’ son is Ewen."
* * *
The monastery at the edge of town was large and imposing. Ewen bruised his knuckles knocking at the big oak door and waited an eternity before a tall man in black robes came to admit him to a small antechamber.
"I’d, uh, like to speak to someone in charge," Ewen said.
"I am Brother Alastair," the man said, "the abbot of this monastery. You can speak to me."
Ewen pulled out the inked portrait of the Savior of Soles that he had taken from Red. "I asked at the church rectory where these were being given away, and the priest told me they were made by someone here at the monastery."
Brother Alastair gave a quick glance at the paper. "Perhaps. What is it you would like to know?"
"Someone wearing robes like yours once spoke to me on the street where I was begging and admired the portrait I drew on the sidewalk. This portrait. It’s my trademark."
"Your trademark? A trademark for begging?"
"Begging and shoemaking. That means the portrait belongs to me and others shouldn’t be allowed to copy it."
Brother Alastair looked surprised at that. "But it’s a picture of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus belongs to everyone."
"Well, this one belongs to me. I created it, and I know what you people are up to here." Ewen pointed to the paper. "Those shapes on the bottom of the portrait are . . . writing."
The abbot looked aghast. "What do you mean, writing? What, those little lines?"
"Yes, those lines. And I know it says ‘Father, forgive me,’ in whatever system you use here, if that robed man on the street remembered it correctly."
The abbot stifled a laugh.
"What’s so funny?" Ewen said.
"It really says ‘Come to the abbey.’ It’s a message for you."
Ewen’s face wrinkled. "For me?"
"We’ve been waiting."
Ewen stopped breathing for a moment, wondering if a trap was about to be sprung. Brother Alastair just kept smiling, so Ewen said, "Well, here I am. But for what?"
"We are Benedictines here," the abbot said. "Most of us, anyway."
"What exactly does that mean?"
The monk walked over to a small desk and withdrew an object from a drawer. It was a rectangular thing the size of a paving stone, but bound in leather with gilt edges.
"Do you know what this is, son?" the monk asked.
Ewen shook his head no.
"Come over here then and have a look."
As Ewen approached, the monk opened the object to reveal paper inside. Hundreds of creamy, fine-textured pages, stacked tightly against one another and bound on one side. Each page was filled with row upon row of tiny, unfamiliar shapes. The monk turned the pages to a spot marked with a red ribbon and scanned down with his finger to find a passage, then read, "From the book of Isaiah: ‘And now, go, write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever.’"
"A . . . book?" said Ewen, looking confused. "Whose words are those?"
"Yes, this is called a book," the monk said. "The Good Book, in fact. Its real name is the Bible. Many of us here believe it contains the words of God."
"Old-style writing!" Ewen said. "You could get killed for having that."
"As could you for writing prayers, or whatever, on the sidewalks. While writing is not strictly allowed in Edinburgh, some of our devout souls will admit the value in preserving the word of the Lord. We Benedictines are concerned not just with keeping alive the wo
rd of God, but with preserving knowledge."
Ewen thought of his drawn word stories. "Can I learn to write in your system?"
"Yes, of course," the monk said. "We were hoping that you might find your way here and work with us as a scribe. Perhaps as an illustrator, as well."
"You’d just take me like that?"
"Oh, we’ve seen your work around town before. This writing of yours looks most peculiar, but I can see in it a flair for calligraphy." Ewen made a face, so the abbot added, "That means you write beautifully."
"You can tell that just from the sidewalk drawings?"
"Yes. That and . . ." The monk shifted his weight onto one leg and lifted the other to show Ewen his shoe under the robe. It was one of Ewen’s clogs, and there on the sole was his trademark portrait, with a worn-in halo.
"Would you like to stay on here at the monastery and become one of us?" the monk asked.
Ewen thought briefly about lying, but decided to trust the monk with the truth. "I have to admit, I’m not very religious."
"Well, that’s not an absolute necessity," the monk said. "More than anything, we need scribes with steady hands."
The monk led him to an inner door and down a hallway to a large room at the back of the building. This room was lighted well from several large south-facing windows. Inside labored a handful of men sitting at desks, slowly copying tiny characters onto crisp white sheets of paper. One of the copyists was familiar as the man who had questioned him on the sidewalk.
"Are they all working on the Bible?" Ewen asked.
"No. We also keep other important works alive." Brother Alastair picked up a finished book from a nearby case. "This one is called Macbeth. It is very old. This one is Tom Sawyer. It, too, is pretty old."
"Were they saints?"
"Hardly. Tom Sawyer is about the adventures of a boy who grew up in America, long before the Holy War destroyed it. It’s not a true story, but many people have admired the tale nonetheless."
Ewen looked about the room and noticed many large cabinets holding shelf upon shelf of thick volumes, as if they had been crafted solely for that purpose. Book cases. Ewen found the idea intriguing.
"What do you do with all of these books?" Ewen asked.
"We read them, of course, and trade them with the other monasteries and enlightened parties. They are primarily for safekeeping until the rest of the humanity decides to begin reading once again."
"But aren’t you afraid of getting caught?"
"Weren’t you?"
Ewen smiled slyly at the monk, who returned the grin.
"Tell me," Ewen said, "if I used writing to record the story of my father–how he lived and how he died–do you think anyone else would want to read it?"
"Perhaps," said the abbot. "It all depends on how interesting a man he was, and how skillfully you write the story."
Ewen didn’t have to think about that too long. "Then I’d like very much to become one of your scribes."
Brother Alastair smiled warmly. Ewen thought of the newly found friends he’d be leaving behind on the streets and asked, "If I learned your system of writing, would it be all right to share the knowledge with some friends who might also care to learn?"
"By all means, lad, as long as you’re sure these friends can be trusted. We want to encourage people to take up writing again."
"Good. When can I begin?"
The monk put a friendly hand on his shoulder. "It will take some time to teach you to write properly, but we can begin immediately."
"I’m looking forward to it," Ewen said. "Now, tell me more about this Tom Sawyer."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Follow the links below to read Analog's fiction nominated for the Nebula Awards.
Novellas:
"The Ice Dragon's Song" by Bud Sparhawk (July/August 1998)
"The Astronaut from Wyoming" by Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion (July/August 1999)
"Reality Check" by Michael A. Burstein (November 1999)
Novelettes:
"Absent Friends" by Michael A. Burstein (September 1998)
"Drawn Words" by Brian Plante (October 1998)
Short Stories:
"The Stones from which Meadows Grow" by Wolf Read (March 1998)
"In Space No One Can Hear" by Michael A. Burstein (July/August 1998)
"Nor Through Inaction" by Charles Ardai and Michael A. Burstein (October 1998)
"Nor a Lender Be" by James Van Pelt (February 1999)
Asimov's nominees can be found at