Gutenberg's Apprentice (19 page)

Primly Heilant pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t count on it. There’s no love lost right now between His Grace and the pope.”

“Meaning?”

Archly, Heilant smiled. His eyes probed Peter. If he struggled over whether to divulge a thing he shouldn’t, the struggle was both brief and futile. He dropped his voice. “The Jubilee indulgence is as good as dead. They’re even planning to refuse the pope’s new tithe.”

“Enough of pumping dry the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation,” Peter whispered; Heilant nodded. At least, thought Peter, Dietrich’s thoughts were not on Mainz. “A little standoff then, between His Grace and Nicholas the Fifth,” he said.

The look was withering. “His only aim is to extort us.”

The words could have been Jakob’s. Peter laughed. He stayed and drank a while, to cover up his tracks, but learned no more.

As fate would have it, entering the square as Peter left the Schreibhaus was Klaus Pinzler, altar painter, illustrator to the book trade. How now, the fellow said, we rarely see you up this way. Come share a drop of cherry wine. Refusal would be taken as a slight, Peter knew—not just by Pinzler but by Fust, who treated all his furnishers as equals, the better to extract his terms. The cherry trees that lined the Leichhof and marched up along the stream to form a good-sized orchard were in frothy bloom. The blue door of the painter’s workshop brought his daughter with her blue-tipped fingers to his mind, but only Pinzler and his wife were there. “A pity Anna’s out,” the woman said and laid out cheese and bread, a hunk of sausage. Her keen eyes assessed the weave of Peter’s tunic, his green cloak; he saw great swags of cloth suspended from the rafters. As she counted up his threads and weight and worth, he toasted to the speedy restoration of the gentry’s appetite for painted panels, banners, saddle silks, and cloaks.

Klaus Pinzler probed with some acuity the state of Fust’s affairs. “Things will go ill for us,” he said, “if there is war between Archbishop Dietrich and the Palatine.” He pulled his short dark beard and frowned; his buyers were restricted to the nobles in the local countryside. “Not so your father, though.”

Fust’s books and baubles flew across and past that ragged patchwork on the Rhine, the independent duchies poking up in Dietrich’s quilt: the seats of Wertheim, Falkenstein and Nassau, Katzenelnbogen. “He thinks that it will calm,” said Peter, “if for no other reason than that the princes are too poor to war.” Or we might hope, he added, smiling, that Dietrich will direct his anger at the pope and keep the tithe to spend on fripperies in Mainz. If they but knew what Peter knew, he thought. The feeling lifted him with secret pride.

He was about to take his cloak up when the daughter of the house appeared. He had not seen her that whole intervening year, except for glimpses at the market. A slender, solemn thing she was, not more than seventeen. She entered from the street and stopped, looked sharply at her parents, dropped a half a curtsy.

“Anna,” said her mother. “You remember Master Schoeffer.”

“Good evening,” she said simply as she started moving toward the stair.

“You got it?” Pinzler asked. He shrugged his shoulders Peter’s way, as if to say his daughter might learn better manners.

“Of course.”

“We had run out of paste,” Pinzler explained.

“I’ve always wondered how you mix your paints.”

“Anna will show you,” said her father. “If she would be so kind.”

She flipped her braid as if to say,
Whatever you require
.

The table in the upstairs loft was covered by a jumble of small shells and vials, toward which the painter’s daughter flapped a small, thin hand. “Forgive the mess,” she said.

His eyes roved over brushes and vibrant powders: cerulean and forest green and crimson, lapis lazuli. He glanced at her pale hands and said, “I liked them blue.”

“I
do
wash, now and then.” Anna Pinzler rolled her dark almond eyes.

There was a little vial of dried red beetles Peter knew; he had himself used these to make the ruby ink for rubrication. He bent and inhaled the bitter, earthy notes of gum and wax and oil. He felt a sudden urge to sit and open up his pouch, unwrap his vitriol and lumps of gall—though they sat unused now in his own room. The girl was taking out a packet from a pocket in her smock. Instantly he smelled it.

“Fishy,” he said, and then blushed scarlet.

She looked at him as if he were entirely mad. An innocent, a virgin, then. Inside the wrapping she pulled open lay a dried, translucent membrane. “The lining of the sturgeon’s breast,” she said. Peter must have looked perplexed. “Part of his lungs, I guess.” She stroked the pearly sheet. “Which when he dies, gives us the matter we dissolve to fix our pigments.” She frowned, a pretty little scowl. “It has to soak in lime and vinegar an age.”

He thought he’d never seen a girl so self-possessed. She bent, dark-haired and elfin, and started naming things. “Malachite, azurite, minim, chalk. Auripigmentium.” A warning finger: “Never let the metals near the mouth.” A row of drying plants swung by her casement window. “Blue woad and indigo tinctoria, crozophora for the mauve.” She gestured at a row of vials, a mortar and its pestle. “Amber, hempseed, linseed. Tears of Arabic.” She lifted up the little waxy balls. “And then the Kermes bugs, pour souls.” She peered into the jar. “I never like to think of how they get them.” Or else the way they die, he thought, but did not say: the females only blazed that red when pregnant with new life.

“I use them too,” he said, “sometimes.”

Then as abruptly as she started, she was done. “That’s all there is.”

He looked around: a window and a mirror and a narrow bed. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s also quite good light.”

He caught a flash of little pearly teeth. “It’s better in the orchard.”

“Perhaps you’ll show me then, sometime.” The words were stupid, but he watched with pleasure as they brushed a rosy wash across her cheeks. He felt himself stir in response, and clattered down the stairs to seize his cloak and cover up the hunger that arose. He did not look to see if she had followed, but slipped out, his blood pounding, picturing those pale fingers in his mouth.

CHAPTER 4

BROTHERHOOD

        
June 1452

T
HEFT WAS THE FEAR: theft of an idea that, unmoored from its true genesis inside one mind, might readily be snatched, passed on, proclaimed by an impostor as his own. The law protected property, but not the private precincts of a bold, inventive mind.

The master knew this more than most. Had he not come back from a trip to Holland the preceding year, muttering about a book he’d seen with images and words printed from wooden blocks? A man with half his wits might see how easily those lines of wooden letters could be sawed apart. Had he not sworn them all to secrecy and double-locked the shop and the men with it, every night and morning? Had he not hidden all his life—as he hid now behind this subterfuge, installing every evening the fake molds for making mirrors in plain view?

The threat emerged in earnest early in the summer when Fust returned to say he’d heard about a man in Avignon who taught a secret art involving alphabets of steel. “You haven’t shown it anywhere?” he asked his partner sharply. The master’s face had darkened at his words, but he answered just as curtly. “I keep my affairs secret, as you know.” He glanced at Hans, his thin lips working. “But spies are everywhere. I’ve had them try to steal from me before.”

They could not be too careful. Pray to Saint Benedict, or Paul or Peter, to all fourteen Holy Helpers, I don’t care, the master said. Just pray for some protection: the workshop was ringed round with thieves, and they’d not even printed the first sheet.

“My point precisely.” Fust said it like a banker. “How much longer until you get started printing?”

“Three weeks—or four.”

And then, thought Peter—months and months—and years, more years—until they’d printed all hundred and twenty copies of those scores of quires. They’d need a host of angels, he thought, sick at heart—the whole host of the archangels with their bright enfolding wings—to keep this secret under guard.

“What about Rosenberg?” He pushed it grimly out. “He’s seen our printing, too.” The master’s head jerked up.

“And quite forgotten it,” snapped Gutenberg.

Fust looked between them. “What gives you that assurance?”

“There’s a new order for indulgences,” said Peter, turning to his father, “which might well jog his memory.”

The master shot his apprentice a sour look. “Leave them to me.”

Fust wiped his forehead with one arm. “If only we were sure of silence.” He looked out through the grime that streaked the upstairs window. “But how—how do you buy the silence of six thousand souls?”

Instantly, the thought arrived. “The guilds,” said Peter.

Both men looked at him with incredulity. The vision had passed swiftly, but Peter had no doubt of what he’d seen: his uncle, twisting that great golden seal.

“It’s in their interest, surely.” His heart was racing as he worked it out. “It’s in all our interest—the whole city’s—that it not fall into Dietrich’s hands.”

“Insanity.” The master’s lips drew back. “I wouldn’t trust a Mainz guild any further than I spit.”

“You were a member of a guild yourself, I thought.”

“Another place. Another life. The guildsmen here are poison—”

“—no more than are the Elder clans,” Fust cut across him, folding both his arms. They stood that way a moment, facing off.

“It seems to me,” said Peter, stepping in between them for the first time, although not the last, “that to the council this might seem a step toward freedom. Not now”—he held a hand up to thwart Gutenberg from speaking—“but when we’re done. The press might help them too, then—I don’t know, to mint some gold, shake off that yoke.”

“This press is mine.” Gutenberg pulled himself to his full, imposing height.

“Not only.” Fust stood planted, balancing as he always had between the working class from whence he’d sprung and the upper classes he now served.

“You think some yokels can protect us?” Gutenberg laughed harshly.

Fust kept his head. “What other shield would you suggest? None of your friends, or relatives, Johann—not any member of the clergy.”

“I’ve got it well in hand, I said. I have his ear, and I can work him like a piece of putty if I have to.” The look he shot at Peter was pure venom.

“It takes one whisper, only one.” Fust pursed his lips. “You cannot guarantee that none will leak, not over all this time.”

“So you would drag it through each tavern.”

“That isn’t how it works.” Fust drew himself up too then, every bit as proud. “I know these guilds. I know the leaders, every one. If they’re convinced it’s in their interest, they will take our dues and keep the secret sealed.”

Gutenberg looked first at Peter, then at Fust, and knew he was defeated. “I bow then to your great superiority,” he said, and turned and vanished down the stairs.

It wasn’t that the master loathed the guildsmen, Hans said when he learned of the new plan. It was more that he had never feared the nobles or the clergy. Why, back in Strassburg, he’d had them eating from his hands. The parties at his farmhouse were a legend. He rigged a way to make a liquor out of every plant that grew about the place. He had the gold, you see—and then that roaring, blazing mouth.

“Mainz gold,” said Peter, not without admiration.

“He even held your treasurer for ransom once.” Hans grinned.

“I heard.”

“The stories I could tell you,” said the smith, and laughed, his brown face creasing in a thousand folds. Peter should have asked him then about those cryptic comments that the master made about the business he had there. But something else was on the young man’s mind.

“Stories about women?” he prompted.

“You heard no word from me.” Hans held him with a beady eye. Peter nodded. Well, said Hans, it happened long ago, before his time. “The way I heard it, he was once engaged.”

“Poor wench.”

Hans laughed. “The lady thought so, anyway—and when Henne refused, she sued him for breach of promise.” That much he knew for sure. That, and her name: Anna of the Iron Door. The master won the suit, but had to pay the court a fine, to compensate for the extremity and foulness of his mouth. Hans shook his head and grinned. “He said he didn’t care who knew it, it was God’s own truth: he wished to hell her iron door had rusted shut.”

And Peter wished for just the opposite when he took Anna Pinzler walking in the fields. She was a slip of girl, a clean-limbed filly—yet possessed of such a keenness that it took his breath away. He bent his energies to capturing her bright and concentrated gaze, threw off without a backward look his monkish habits.

It seemed to him his youth returned, slipping with ease inside the man he had become. They dashed among the crumbling dirt clods of those summer lanes and barefoot through the copses, picking cherries; lay panting on their backs, picking out the pictures in the fleet and shifting clouds. The first time that he kissed her, Anna closed her eyes and stood on tiptoe underneath a tree. He held her narrow face between his palms and watched the sun and shadow play across its smooth, sweet planes. Her eyes flew open. “What?” A sylph, a woodland nymph, is what you are, he almost said. Instead he took her in his arms. He did not care from whence she came or who her father was. The world was shifting and the old rules breaking down. His own father, after all, had married down in choosing Grede. Down, up, in any case were monstrous fictions—each one of them was equal, in the Book they made—this Book that one day all would reach with hungry hands to grasp.

His Anna’s eyes were dark, yet brilliant in their shining, and her painter’s hands both delicate and strong. She brought chalk and charcoal and a little sketchbook everywhere; she was a maker as he was. What most delighted him, though, was the way she saw. Despite her stillness, her containment, she could be touched quite instantly by beauty and transformed. It might be a sudden blazing of the flax, gone yellow overnight to gird the city in a sunburst. Or else a tiny thing, a drop of dew that swelled with rainbows on a leaf. Her painter’s eye saw harmony in every shifting contrast. She’d take his hand and point, and marvel at God’s artistry. She’d turn to him and say she guessed he did the same with his own hand and quill. He found that he could not naysay her. It was a gift, he said, that God had given him: a scribe he was, and always would be. He longed to tell her how that grace had put his hand now to this new, uplifting service. But he was bound as ever by his vow. He’d teach her then, he said instead, to wrest the magic of the meaning from the letters that he used. It was not Anna’s fault that she’d been born a girl, and poor, and never learned to read.