Gutenberg's Apprentice (2 page)

The ship was weighted low with cargo; passengers who had no railing clung to staves nailed to the central hold. They were mere specks upon the river rushing toward the sea. The vessel pitched and rolled, and he could feel the shiver of that mighty force beneath his feet. The river seemed to fling him backward, down, with every bend that hauled him closer to his home.

When he was young, he’d thought the Rhine ships looked like ladies’ slippers: flat and low along the prow, then rising aft to curl like some outlandish petal at the captain’s back. He’d been a boy the last time he saw these shores. Yet he returned now as a man—a man of letters, a
clericus
, a scribe. He bore the tools of his profession in a pouch slung like a quiver at his side: the sealed horn of ink, his quills and reeds, his bone and chalk and chamois.

The valley of the Rhine peeled off to either side in banks of green and gold, and farther up outcroppings rose, perched high above the river like so many gnomes. An ancient peaty smell mingled sickeningly with the pomades and the late-September sweat of bodies crammed together at the rail. All he knew was that the matter was urgent. His father would not have called him back to celebrate the birth of his new son, although a child this late in life was wondrous news. Nor was he likely to have picked Peter a wife. First get yourself established, Johann Fust had always said, and then you’ll have your choice of brides. The only clue lay in a postscript in his looping hand:
I’ve met a most amazing man
.

The Seine had smelled of chalk and stone, a sharp and thrilling city striving. The Rhine was wider, darker, rooted in the forest and the field. Peter breathed in its odor, the odor he had known most of his life. They were not far from Gernsheim now, where he’d been born and raised and tended sheep. Where he’d been orphaned, and then saved. Fleetingly he saw the farm, and Father Paul. He never would forget the old priest’s palsied paw, and then his own small fist, tracing out his letters in fulfilment of his mother’s dying wish. He looked down at that very hand clamped now upon the railing—that hand that was the master of a dozen scripts. It was a perfect tool: with it he stood, at the Sorbonne, right at the apex of the world.

And what a world it was! Even decades later he could taste the feeling of that year of Jubilee. The Holy Roman Empire pulsed like a rich man with a fever, fearful yet exalted at the prospect of the light. All Christendom hung in the balance, waiting. There was a new pope on Saint Peter’s throne, and some strange new spirit rising. The schism of three popes had been laid to rest; the cardinals had bowed at last to the authority of Rome. The new Italian pontiff, Nicholas V, had vowed to sweep the vile world clean. He’d called his Jubilee to bring the faithful back to penitence, and undo years of plunder, ruled by greed.

That new wind was sweeping through the markets and the lecture halls, the streets and seats of learning from Bologna up to Paris. It licked around the stools where new men labored at their quills, copying the texts that fed the best minds in the western world. That wind had swept in masses of new students, lifted by prosperity and trade, all avid for their chance; it threw the scribes together in long ranks, writing madly to keep up with the demand. He’d felt the force of it up his own arm, lifting his eyes to heights he’d never dreamed, for he was one of these new men, these scholar-scribes.

And then the wind stalled, stopped short by the thick brown band of the Rhine. Peter watched the other trading boats, as thick as krill upon the water. Merchants, moneylenders, bureaucrats, and priests, all servants of Mammon as much as of God. He knew for certain that the winds of change were dead upon these shores when in the afternoon their boat put in to Speyer. He hung back when the passengers leapt off; he’d spied some merchants friendly with his father he would have to greet if he were seen. Instead he hung about the pilings, watching as the docker swung the crane and dug it deep into the bank.

He’d brought only what little he could carry, including a new manuscript of Cicero he had just started when the summons came. The rest he’d left behind in Paris as a kind of charm. His father could not mean he had to stay in Mainz. Not after all that Peter had achieved: his rapid rise through the ranks, his luck at being chosen not a month before to represent the workshop to the rector of the university. He wrote these extra books at night, to earn the coins for things his father’s stipend did not cover and he’d rather not reveal. The manuscript, and ten blank sets of pages, he had packed inside a barrel from the family trading firm. Cicero,
On Moral Duties
. Oh, the parallel was rich: the great man’s lectures to his son. It floated with him now, lashed to the others in the hold, the vellum snug inside its curly nest of shavings.

At least, that’s where he had last seen it stowed. Until, with shock, he saw his small brown cask tossed up and lashed onto the massive hook that swung the goods to shore. He leapt and shouted, waved his arms. The docker hauled on the rope. The barrel bore the mark of Mainz, he grunted. And no goods could transit in or out of Mainz these past three weeks, since the archbishop slapped the city with the unholy ban.

“What ban?” His father’s friends were at his back then, breathing sourly. “Leave it,” Widder hissed, “or you will never see it back.” The barrel branded “Brothers Fust” sailed slowly through the sky. “Don’t get much news, I guess, up there in Paris?” An elbow dug into his side. Excommunication was Archbishop Dietrich’s favorite means of brandishing his fist; he would shut a city in his diocese for weeks and sometimes months if local councils tried to cut into his power or his revenues.

The captain blew his whistle and the passengers all piled back on, propelling Peter forward on that rank and jostling tide. He was wedged in, hauled back, no better than a shipping cask. Three years he’d been away, by God, and not a bloody thing had changed.

As they gained speed, he prayed that he might soon escape this spent and feuding place. He bent his body with the current as the river coiled itself past Gernsheim, looped three times like some gigantic spring, then shot the boat that bore him up the few remaining miles.

The city looked the same. Not battered in the least, though he had heard enough in transit to conclude that Mainz was in extremis. She still stood proud upon the bank, an island girded by a high white wall, tipped red and blue as if by an illuminator’s brush. The ship moved slowly past the vineyards of the abbeys that encroached upon her southern door like fattened bishops. Across the river to the right, a smaller, muddy mouth drained from the Hessian plain. The cathedral city of the archbishopric of Mainz sat just astride the confluence of Rhine and Main.

The foreshore that late afternoon seemed drained of life. Out of instinct Peter raised his eyes to check the color of the sky. The Iron Gate would soon be shut. The day’s last stream of men and carts was toiling up the rocks, and he scrambled to join in, feet sinking into brackish sand. Up close the mighty wall was flaking, puckered at the massive hinges like a toothless hag. Beneath the arch he kissed his palm and touched it to the city seal. A dogleg left and right, and he was on the square they called the Brand, and home.

It was strangely quiet as he stood there, tensing and untensing his long hands. Drays waiting for unloading stood before the Kaufhaus, the huge customs hall. Horses stamped, the starlings wheeled, yet over everything there hung a pall. His eyes went to the jerking clock hands on the tallest spire, the red cathedral of St. Martin’s. He waited until they stood in a straight line. They clicked, the mechanism cracking sharply in the silence. No bells. In all those forty churches, he could hear no bells. The archbishop’s ban was just another sharp reminder of who really held the reins, his father’s friends had said. The workingmen had won the city council and tried to halt the years of plunder by the ruling Elder clans. But when the council would not pay the interest that those clans demanded on the sweetheart deals they’d engineered, the old guard simply called in Archbishop Dietrich’s fist. It was the same old litany of greed, the grappling for power in this backwater that history had left behind. Peter turned and struck across the square toward the Haus zur Rosau.

His father’s house was not the grandest of all the timbered merchant homes that ringed the Brand. Yet it was imposing, like the man himself: broad and solid with an unexpected grace inside. Its floors were of blue slate, its yellow walls warmed by new tapestries from France and Flanders—though in the heat of this late summer these were rolled away, the window gaps all hung with gauze.

His foster father had the big man’s way of crushing those he loved against the ample shelf that was his stomach. And then he held Peter at arm’s length. “At last.” He smiled.

“You knew full well which boat I would be on.”

“Yet still I watched for every one.” Johann Fust had eyes as blue as Mary’s vestments in a face that with the years and success had reddened and filled. One eye winked.

“Then you’ll have noticed I come empty-handed.” Peter rolled his eyes.

“They stopped you then? At Speyer?”

“You might have warned me.”

His father squeezed his shoulder. “Nothing that a shilling in a palm won’t fix. What matters is that you’re home.” Fust turned as Grede stepped out into the hall. His father’s wife looked wan, but on her lips still played the wry smile she had always worn. “Wonder of wonders.” She turned her cheek to his. “I’d given up all hope you’d see your brother before he could hold a stylus.”

“I left the Palace of the Louvre in some despair.” He grinned and bowed, raking the floor with one limp hand. “To grace ye people in your humble homes.”

She laughed. And yet his father’s bright young bride—his second, and a kind of sister to Peter—appeared exhausted: as if, having survived once more the terror of the childbirth bed, she had at last left youth behind. She had not looked this way when she bore Christina five years before.

They went on to the big front room and stopped before a cradle. Fust took the bundle in his arms. “We call him Henchin. Little Hans,” he said with unmasked pride. The baby yawned, its face scrunched up like an old wizened apple. Its eyes flew open, blue as those that gazed in wonderment down on them. Peter put a finger to the tiny fist, and bent to kiss the tiny head. He’d never had a sister or a brother who shared his own blood; his mother died in bearing him. He’d been saved, adopted into this fine house, by her first cousin, Fust’s first wife. Gently he unwound the little clinging fingers. He’d grown to manhood in these walls. But this in no way meant he held a claim against this little red-faced chap—only because of his late arrival had Peter been welcomed years before into this house.

All through the meal that followed Peter watched his father, hoping for some sign. Grede had put out beeswax candles and her prized Venetian glass. The cook had made roast lamb, potatoes, chard, some fowl baked in a pie. They’d wash it down with Rheingau from St. Jakob’s vines. Peter had brought gifts: a calfskin workbook for Tina, five by now and as primped and blond as any cherub, and a baby’s beechwood game of catch-a-bob. The servants filed in silently as Fust stood, leafing with a frown through a worn pocket Bible. “A reading from Saint Matthew,” he said finally, and cleared his throat. “Whose birth we honor in these days.”

Peter caught Grede’s eye. Since when did Fust say blessings at the table?
The ban
, she mouthed back, nostrils flaring. Dietrich backed his own class, naturally; the lower orders might pretend to rule, but they would have to fall in line. There’d be no sacraments until the upstart council had backed down. The archbishop’s word was law: none of his priests would say a mass or take confession; the newly born were unbaptized and the dying were deprived of their last rites, consigned forever to the agony of limbo. Grede’s face was dark with anger.

        
You have heard that it hath been said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other; And if a man will contend with thee in judgment, and take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him.

Fust looked up and fixed his elder son with shining eyes.

        
You have heard that it hath been said, “Thou shalt love your neighbor, and hate thine enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

The assembled foreheads flickered in the candlelight. Fust bowed his large and white-fringed head. Had he chosen that passage just for him? Peter wondered. It wouldn’t be the first time. He tried and failed to catch Fust’s gaze. What message did his father mean to send? Acceptance of injustice, and the stilling of one’s own desires? Impatience flooded him as he stood waiting, willing Fust to make the meaning of this journey clear.

“Though we may chafe, let’s not forget the wisdom of the scriptures.” Fust signaled for the wine. “Nor, on this joyous day when Peter has returned, dwell overmuch on persecution. The fathers of the church were far more persecuted in their time.”

He smiled and raised his goblet to toast Peter. And Peter, chilled, raised his. How should he not? He owed Fust everything. He could not see into the merchant’s heart, yet he could guess what Fust saw every time he looked at Peter: the boy he’d raised, the life he’d forged, the skills and travels he’d unstintingly bestowed. The life of mud and dung from which he’d raised the grubby offspring of his first wife’s cousin. A line appeared in Peter’s mind, as fresh as if old Cicero had penned it just that instant:
There is no more essential duty than returning kindness
.

Words of guidance, penned in deep antiquity and carried forward through the long, dark centuries by Christian scribes.

“The feast of Saint Matthew is auspicious for all business ventures.” Fust’s teeth were gleaming in the torchlight. Peter waited, long legs stretched out from the willow chair. The heat of the day had left the air of the courtyard warm and scented by the rose, and from the lane beyond he smelled the tang of fruit, the thick hot earthiness of livestock. He heard the call of owls, the intermittent roar out of the gaming house—those old, familiar sounds.