Gutenberg's Apprentice (23 page)

They found a cauldron filled with hot mulled wine and drank it fast, and downed some more. Mentelin, for all his freckled innocence, had little trouble putting his away. “What’s on the program then?” Peter bawled in Keffer’s ear.

“First gold, then honey!” Keffer’s yellow locks were shining, like his eyes. He elbowed Mentelin, half a head shorter, at his side. “Best show the bishop how it’s done.” The gaming house up on the flax market would be full to bursting. Mentelin looked back and forth between the two large workingmen, Ruppel slumped on Keffer’s arm. He threw a smile at Peter. “I guess I’d better keep these two in line.”

Ruppel jerked his head up, sketched a sloppy curve into the air with one limp hand. “I’ll show you lines!” he slurred.

“You coming?” Mentelin asked; Peter shook his head. The night was far too fine, the wine too pleasant in his veins, to jam into some stinking cave.

“Got honey of his own,” Keffer hooted as they dragged the scribe away.

The departing pressmen half collided with two monks who stood bemused in the thick, pungent throng, and Peter groaned inside. The damage they might wreak tonight could be extreme. He was still laughing as he turned toward Hans, shaking his head, when someone grasped his arm.

“I hardly recognized you,” came a low, unwelcome voice.

Peter forced himself to focus and cursed the drink that fogged his sight.

“They let you out,” he thickly said, “to spy the seat of sin?” With a forced smile he embraced Petrus Heilant. The scribe looked at him archly and nodded briefly toward Hans. His fellow monk was no one Peter knew.

“The better to combat it,” Heilant answered drily, his right hand lifting to inscribe a cross, ironically, before their eyes. “Drowning your sorrows, like those roughs who nearly crushed us?” He cocked an eyebrow and glanced back, but the three printers had been swallowed by the crowd. “Nice friends you have.”

“Once a smith,” said Peter, shrugging. “Half my uncle’s workshop’s here tonight.” Heilant looked a trace too long at him, with a smile that Peter didn’t like. He dipped his head. “We’ll leave you to your business then, and hope to see you in more . . . salubrious . . . surroundings.”

They moved away, and Peter watched them long enough to see how Heilant glanced back once, his features calculating, before pretending he was gazing past them at the stalls.

“Nosy bugger,” Peter said to Hans.

The smith nodded. “Don’t know why you give that kind the time of day.”

“Know thine enemy,” said Peter, as they edged back toward the stand of wine. They gave their cups back, pocketing their penny caution, and started roaming. Now and then they paused to look more closely at a clock, a hide, a whirligig, a feathered cap. Eventually like homing birds they fetched up at the goldsmiths’ stands along the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin. Across the square, the columns of the Mint were dimly lit, but here the smiths had made resplendent the huts where they sold goods throughout the year. The Windeckes’ shelves were draped in crimson velvet, piled with jewelry that flashed with semiprecious stones. To either side stood a dour smith, a dagger at his belt. Jakob’s shop displayed its silver goblets, copper chafing dishes, candlesticks and sconces on three rising tiers, each carpeted in lamb’s wool. Beside this Gottholt’s stand was filled with cutlery, then Isenmenger’s, iron pots and clasps and tongs.

Hans bent, examining a ring, and Peter asked, “You ever miss it?”

“Now and again.” He put the ring back. “But then there’s only so much you can do with gold.”

“You’d rather muck about with lead.”

“Wouldn’t know what I should buy with it.” Hans shrugged.

“You’ll keep your copy then?” The others, Peter guessed, would sell their Bibles just as soon as they were finished. Hans ran his tongue across his teeth and shook his head. “Don’t ride your horse before it’s shod.”

“Sound advice,” said Peter.

“Not that Henne ever heeds it.” Hans smiled grimly. “Always rushing on ahead.” He called the master by a name nobody else would dare to use—knew him more closely, Peter thought, than anyone. A mouse ran down a hallway in his head. Was this what happened, way back when, he slowly asked—that thing he’d said, a while ago—something about a Christian robbing graves?

Hans glanced quickly left and right. He jerked his head, and Peter followed to the market’s darker edge. “You swear,” he said, and Peter nodded. A brief smile lit the smith’s creased face. “A scene, it was. They even hauled me up before the judge.” Then he went serious again. “It wasn’t nothing, though, but greed. He had these partners, see. Two fellows called Andreas—for the mirrors. He already had me carving letters too, one at a time.” Hans rolled his eyes back, as if rolling the whole thing back through his mind. “Anyway, they paid a heap to get in on the business. Then one of the poor bastards got the fever. You should have seen the master tell Lorenz to run like hell and grab the
formes
and under no condition touch the man.” He grinned. “He’s always had a deathly fear of pox and plague.”

“And came much closer than a Christian should, to robbing graves,” Peter murmured.

“The dead man’s brother went after him hammer and tongs. The thieving dog, he tried to grab his brother’s piece. Called in the law and witnesses, the lot—for all the good it did him.” Hans shook his head. “Master won it fair and square, according to the contract.”

“But even so he didn’t stick around in Strassburg.”

“We had to save our skins, too, don’t forget, from all them Armagnacs.”

They drifted back. As they were passing the last stall, a chalice caught the goldsmith’s eye. He picked it up and ran a finger along the square flanged base. “Too thick,” he said beneath his breath.

“I’m sure that yours was finer.” Hans would have made the rank of master, surely, if he hadn’t followed Gutenberg—yet he had been content to stay a journeyman. Hans set the chalice back, looked with disdain upon the rings, some of plain gold, others made of plaited bands.

“We had to do a setting in my day.” He turned away.

These were not
Meisterwerks
, of course, but simple journeywork. In Mainz, like Strassburg, journeymen would have to set a beveled stone, or craft a silver bowl, at least engrave the inside of a decorated band, to gain the master’s rank.

“That I would like to see,” said Peter.

Reflexively, Hans put a hand up to his chest. “All right,” he said, and started walking swiftly from the market.

“I didn’t mean—,” said Peter as he caught him up, but Hans just shushed him, trotting out into the lane. The air was colder there; the snow was barely trodden. Hans plunged a hand into his leather jerkin. The little packet he drew out was wrapped in silk; he opened it and held it to his mouth and blew, then polished it upon his sleeve before he handed it to Peter.

By the snip of moon he saw it was a woman’s band, in braided gold, set with a large, dark stone. It was too dark to tell the color. Hans’s eyes were on the ring, but by their look he saw instead the hand that ring once graced.

“I made that nineteen years ago.” His voice was low. “I could have had my own shop, in Speyer or Cologne. I had my eye on a girl in Strassburg, though. Funny, how things go.”

He took the ring back, lifted it to catch the light. Above them there were candles in the narrow windows of the hospice of the Holy Ghost, and the writhing creatures on its gutters cast strange shadows on its stones. Hans shrugged. “That’s how I wound up working for the lunatic, Gutenberg, and made a pile of useless gold.”

“Why useless?” Peter asked.

“We’d planned to buy a farm.” Hans wrapped the ring and tucked it back.

“I’m sorry.”

Hans made a little motion with his head. “God has long since saved their souls. She died in childbirth, see, her and the baby both.”

Peter put a hand upon his shoulder. “I’ll pray for them.”

“It’s just the time of year. It happened at this time of year, that’s all.”

Peter thought of saying he had lost his mother, too. But there he stood: alive, full-grown.

They walked slowly back toward the Humbrechthof, past the grocers’ guild, decked out in bunting for the blessed birth, the shuttered workshops of the plumbers and the rope makers. The wind came scouring down the river gorge, pushing all the snow clouds to the south. Above them there were patches of deep black and stars. They both looked up but gave no heed to how they trod the snow below. Yet now, years later, as he looks upon them, Peter sees the way their paths diverged. Each went his separate way, to end the feast day in his separate church: Hans to join the master at St. Christopher, Peter to the Fusts at St. Quintin.

CHAPTER 9

WILDERNESS

        
[4.5 quires of 65]

        
January–February 1453

T
HE TASK before them was as blank and boundless as the winter fields. In five months they had barely made a dent—less than a tenth of those twelve hundred eighty pages had been set and printed. They trudged half frozen through the days and nights, dulled by the blizzard: the white sheets rose, and fell, and rose again to settle on their drying lines.

Gutenberg sat motionless for hours, perched on his stool. He kept his cloak wrapped tight beneath his chin, his long beard tucked from sight. The strange effect was of a barn owl: all that stirred was his queer mop of hair, rotating as he watched their every move. His head would ratchet, and his body bob in a strange rhythm as he counted. He measured each man’s output: lines per hour, the pages through the press each day; the time it took to move a
forme
from stone to press, then back. The time between the printing of one page, and then the setting up to print the next. He had Lorenz bring in a small brass clock that sat there ticking as he eyed it, quill pen scratching, noting every movement of each hand.

A week of this, and he made his pronouncement. Another press would be required. Keffer was to run it, and they’d need two new men to apply the ink, another boy or two. The quantities of type and ink would double. Fust, anxious at the slowness of their pace, had clearly given his consent. The hammers started pounding, and two beaters came to spread the ink, one Götz, from Schlettstadt, then another Hans, from Speyer. Ruppel and Keffer each thus had his own press, with its inker and its devil. Wiegand and two other lads kept the sheets dampened, and when printed, dried and folded. In the composing room, Mentelin sat between Hans and Peter.

The new arrangement helped, at first. They picked the pace up and managed two full pages every day, in a shift that stretched from dawn to well past vespers. But then the pressmen learned the ins and outs and soon could crank the sheets out well before the setters had prepared the next. Those empty hours drove Gutenberg into a rage. A three-gammed gimpy mongrel bitch, he called them, pulling at his hair; he’d have to stagger things, and print the pages in a different way. Keffer would print a recto in the afternoon, Ruppel the next morning do its verso—and then vice versa. The inks he’d trick, so Keffer’s, with a bit more lead, would dry in time; the winter chill ensured the pages stayed well damped. That way each press would get half of another run each day; the setters would work longer, to keep both presses well supplied. Dear God, each man thought to himself, and groaned inside, and put his nose back to the grindstone.

Hope waned with the slow waning of their strength. Lent was a week or two away, but it had been a poor year for the grain, and only rarely did Frau Beildeck rustle up some meat or eggs. She tried to keep them going with root mashes and strong beer. Nor was the master’s mood improved: by February they had finished just six quires. They weren’t paid to idle, he snarled, pacing up and down. If any man got out of step, he was to see him: he’d find him work to do. “As for you lot,” he bawled toward the composing room, “I’d whip your buttocks if I didn’t need them on the stools.”

Mentelin, as gentle as a choirboy, looked stung. Peter laughed and shot right back, “You do, and I will fetch the guild.”

Instead, they learned after the fact, he went to Fust and told him that they had to have another pair of setting hands.

Each piece of type by then had gone beneath the press some thirty, forty times. The faces had begun to chip, the edges wear. The first they cast had never been that sharp to start with. There came a day when Hans decreed they had to stop and melt them down, and cast some more. The master was in Strassburg to recruit, and Hans was still the foreman. He kept Mentelin at setting type, to feed one press; the others gladly spent the hours beside the forge. It was remarkable, how lightly they all worked without the master breathing fire. Each man was part, and yet apart, responsible for his own task—just like the scribes who penned the students’ books in sections. Peter thought a great deal in those days of that whole world he’d left behind. Anna did not notice any difference in him; it pained him, even as he hid his real life from her. The falsehood roiled within him, as it must have twisted inside Peter, his disciple, on the morning of Christ’s death, when three times he denied Him. How practiced he was now at lies, thought Peter Schoeffer, tossing on his narrow bed at night.

The peaceful interlude was broken when the master came back unannounced one early February afternoon. Some of the men were seated, stirring; Peter cast with Götz; the boys were grinding ores. All froze the moment he stepped in.

“A pretty picture,” he said, stomping off the snow. “Though I don’t hear two presses going.” He had a youth with him, apparently the latest hire.

“We needed letters.” Hans wiped his hands and went toward him.

“I left you stocked.”

“They were too battered.” Peter stood.

“If I paid you men to think, I’d pay you more.” He cast them his disgusted scowl and went to count the finished piles. “That’s it? Good Christ.” He jerked a thumb toward the youth. “You’d better learn him quick.” Ruppel knocked the lad a stool and case; Hans and Peter quietly conferred. They’d have to cast the extra letters for this new man after hours, Hans said, or Gutenberg would burst a vein for certain.