"Brian Plante - Drawn Words" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

small items and future obligations, he squirreled away a fourth sketch. He
continued his private work whenever he could steal a few minutes away from the
eyes of his family, and his collection of drawn word stories grew. He kept
them hidden in the bottom of his clothing chest, and showed them to no
one. Over time, his repertoire of drawn words grew. Imagining that the old
people before the Holy War must have had a drawn word for just about
everything if they could tell proper stories on paper, Ewen set out to invent
a shape for as many words as he could think of. Not just the easy words like
"horse" and "tree", but intangible things like "fear" and "love". He made
sketches for action words like "walk" and "sew", and modifying words like
"fast" and "good". Some of the words didn’t readily suggest pictures that
could be stripped down to their barest essentials, so Ewen just made up
arbitrary shapes for those. Other words he made from combinations of simpler
symbols. Ewen’s stories were usually transcriptions of the old tales his
parents told him. Stories of strong men and women surviving the bad times to
build a simpler way of life. Even though he had memorized the stories from
hearing them over and over, he was privately happy with the knowledge that he
could never forget them now that he had set them down in drawn words. Over
time, Ewen began to think that his own life was a story worth setting down,
too. He began making daily progress in an ongoing record of the events that
transpired in his life. Sometimes nothing very important happened, and Ewen
just wrote down his thoughts and dreams on those days. It surprised him how
quickly the story of his life began piling up, and he felt sad for all the
other people whose lives just slipped away unremembered. One day late in his
thirteenth year, Ewen was sitting in the outhouse, working on his drawn words
in the dim light that seeped through the cracks, when his father opened the
door without knocking. Gow immediately apologized when he saw the stall was
occupied and turned to go, but he caught a glimpse of the paper on the boy’s
lap. Tiny, graceful shapes in long neat rows filled the sheet. Gow snatched
the paper and crumpled it into a tight ball. "This is the last of these, Ewen
Muir," he said, pointing a shaky finger at the boy. "There will be no more
paper in this house, do you understand?" Ewen quickly pulled up his trousers
and ran from the outhouse as fast as he could. His father cursed and dropped
the wadded up paper into the honey bucket under the outhouse bench. * * * It
was three days later, early in the morning, when the mayor and town elders
burst into the farmhouse, enraged and accusing. Mr. Skene, the weasel-faced
man who carted away the night soil and animal waste every week, was three
steps behind them entering the house. Ewen’s heart pounded like the
blacksmith’s hammer when one of the elders produced a stained, wrinkled sheet
of paper bearing long rows of his drawn words. "Skene here says he got this
out of your outhouse, Muir," said the mayor, an older man with a nose ruddy
from too many nights of drinking spirits. "I thought it might be one of the
boy’s drawings," Skene said, "but when I flattened it out, I didn’t know what
it was." "It’s writing!" the elders shouted. Ewen saw the color drain from
his father’s face as he tried to calm them down. "Gentlemen, it’s just
scribblings, nothing more. Let’s all sit by the fire and share a cup of mead,
shall we?" "Muir, this is no mere scribbling," said the mayor. "We don’t know
what it means but the shapes are too consistent." "Some of the symbols
repeat," another man said. "It can’t be meaningless scribble if it’s so
regular-like!" "The Holy War never ends, Muir," said the dour-faced mayor,