Gutenberg's Apprentice (26 page)

He remembers mainly now how stunned he felt that day. All he could see was Anna’s white, revolted face. Nor did his father see the benefit, at first. They could make more type, faster, Fust said: So what? They still couldn’t print the pages any faster.

“That had occurred to me as well,” the abbot says.

“Write down that Gutenberg’s true genius lay in ordering the work, in breaking down and rearranging all the pieces.” On that Shrove Tuesday, he clapped his hands and spun the whole thing magically around.

“The costs were fixed. The only thing that we could do, he said, was boost the revenue. It struck him almost visibly—that we could easily print more.”

“Ah.” Trithemius makes a note.

That was when they increased the print run. They added five-and-forty copies more, most printed onto vellum. Fust was certain he could sell more lavish copies to the merchants at the northern fairs. What extra cost might be entailed in raw materials paled beside the sums those extra copies would bring in.

“We settled on one hundred eighty, which—in theory at least—would right the ledger.” The printer shakes his head.

“A lot of sacrificial calves,” the abbot murmurs.

“Indeed.” Peter thinks of Abraham and Isaac. “One hundred seventy for every copy.”

They gaze at one another for an instant. Peter sees the green fields of the Rhineland in that spring, the frisky gamboling of calves and lambs. With what excitement they had parted after Easter: Fust against the river swollen with the Alpine melt, to sell in Basel, Austria, Tirol—up to Bavaria, then across the Thuringian woods back home. He took a quire from each of the first Bible books to show in every city to the merchants and the
Brudermeisters
of the guilds—in every country castle to the princes, dukes and margraves. It was a risky move, but they had little choice. They needed the deposits that those buyers pledged.

Rome was not built in just one day, and neither was that Bible. Each step was key, he thinks: a part of that long chain they forged together with enormous effort. The workshop and the crew, the master and apprentice. He feels the loss then, stirring in a dusty corner where he’d laid it long before.

“The Sunday after that was Invocabit,” he tells the abbot quietly. “You needn’t write that down.”

Trithemius smiles, and lifts his hands—a little raising of his palms that’s halfway in between a blessing and a clap.

        
Invocabit me, et ego exaudium meum.
He shall cry to me, and I shall hear him.

That first Sunday of Lent, in the year of our Lord 1453, Peter had stood once more beneath St. Quintin’s vaulted nave. Johann Fust had asked him back and Peter had agreed; the painter’s daughter in her flight no longer stood between them.

Cry to me
. So spoke the Lord unto the Hebrew tribes.
Cry to me, from your wilderness, your weariness: the day of your deliverance is at hand.

The miracle was the multiplying, Peter thought—then and always. From the one loaf, many; from the two fish, enough to feed a multitude. The mystery of God came in through skin and hand and eyes: take this light, this bread, these words, and cast them wide. It filled the air, the ears, this sound now of the punches striking, platens crashing: ceaseless re-creation, over and over, world without end.

N
UMBERS

CHAPTER 1

RETRIBUTION

        
[18 of 65 quires]

        
July 1453

T
HEY HEARD the bugles first, resounding in the hills, and then the great bell of St. Martin’s, striking without cease. A cry went up among the sentries at the Diether Gate. And only then did Gutenberg stand up, alert; the men threw down their tools. The Cobblers’ Lane was jammed with men and women clutching at their children, rushing toward the square. Hooves pounded down the lane that led toward the city center, clattering as they hit the cobbles.

Into their hot and sleepy little city came the horsemen of the Holy See, their cornets sounding, reining in their prancing, foam-flecked mounts.

“Christians, awake!” The herald strained, voice hoarse, lifting from his stirrups. “Be warned! His Holiness Pope Nicholas the Fifth sends dreadful tidings.

“Rome of the East has fallen to the infidel.”

The beggars squatting in the shadows threw their rags over their heads and started wailing. Women screamed; men blanched. And then there was a dreadful silence, punctuated only by the throbbing of the bells. In the crush of people—aproned, sweaty, staring, clutching hammers, brushes, knives—Peter saw his father, wrenched too from the Kaufhaus scales.

“The guns of Satan fired without remorse or cease upon our brethren day and night.” The envoy raised his arm. “All are slaughtered or enslaved. Our brother Constantine is dead, his city desecrated. The holy church of Saint Sophia has become a mosque.”

Rome of the East, Constantinople, the beacon of the Eastern Christian Church. Destroyed. In every stuttered mind, the prophecy of Daniel:
The End Times come when new Rome falls.

In stealth the Muslim Turks had struck, attacking in the darkness before dawn. They’d felled her mighty towers, burned and murdered, raped her women, altars, churches. Forty thousand people turned to meat, their corpses bobbing in the Sea of Marmara like melons in the Grand Canal. No siege and sack more terrible, not even those that had befallen Babylon, Jerusalem, or Troy.

“We’ll have to fight.” Peter blurted it and turned. Gutenberg seemed not to hear. His eyes were locked on the herald, filled both with horror and a grudging awe.

Mehmet II, the Ottomans’ young chieftain, with his lust for blood had caused huge cannons to be forged. They’d pounded at the city wall for weeks, those guns, that force of hell some twenty thousand strong. The largest bombard was as long as your Rhine ships, the envoy said, and gestured toward the waterline. Those few who managed to escape said that the very air was rent with flames.

The master’s look was terrible, transparent. Peter read its meaning instantly. How had those heathen Turks forged such a hellish and immense thing? The wonder froze his mouth and left a flicker twisting in his eyes. What kind of mold, what metal mix, could forge a tube so huge a man could fit inside? When Gutenberg at last broke off his baleful stare, it was to look up at the great bell tolling in St. Martin’s steeple.

At length they learned from those who’d fled to Patmos, Crete, and Venice, creeping broken in their caravels across the Middle Sea, of how the Muslims had turned Christian genius to their worst defeat. Hungarians it was, who traveled into Anatolia and cast that monster that the Turks called their Basilic – Christians like themselves, turned to heretics, who forged it for their mortal enemies deep inside a huge clay pit.

God tests them, holds them to the fire. He roars instead of weeps at their stupidity and sins. Why else had Peter, on that very day, been setting up that very passage? He was on the fourth book of Moses, known as Numbers.
This is the number of the children of Israel, of their army divided according to the houses of their kindreds and their troops, six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty.
The Lord bid Moses take the tribes and number them and muster them into a mighty army.

Peter turned to Mentelin. The shock in his green eyes was like a mirror of his own. Was this why God had given men these gifts? To put his creatures to a test He knew they’d fail? The sultan’s cannon proof that man’s techniques could serve the cause of evil just as easily as good?

This happened on the twenty-ninth of May, although the news had only just reached Rome. The tiding reached the pope on the feast day of a local saint: Saint Maximinus of Trier, who once gave succor to Saint Paul, the patriarch of Constantinople. How scripture’s web did weave its dreadful meanings.

All were punished. Their sins, their cravenness, their greed, were to be blotted, every sinner swept away. The world was changed. Peter felt it even then, the drop inside the gut, the wrenching as it all began to pivot. What he and Gutenberg and Fust, the workshop, lost that day was not of much account, compared to that terrible bloodbath on the Bosphorus. But still the sultan’s strike was the clear cause of all that followed.

“They must be mad!” The master found his voice at last. “To strike like that!” He punched his fist toward the sky. In the dense crowd a man yelled out, “Strike back!” Another, then another, until it thickened to a chant: “Strike back! Strike back!”

“God have mercy!” Gutenberg was shouting. “Strike them, push them back.”

Mentelin and Peter stood dumbstruck, hearing the great roar of hate. There would be holy war: God save them all.

The master did not monger war, more than the rest. Peter understands that now. Gutenberg just felt, like every Christian soul, profoundly wronged—attacked on his own soil. And yet that blow too struck a gong in him that rang an end to all that had been theretofore. The day they heard of Christendom’s defeat, Peter saw a side of Master Gutenberg he’d never seen before: the warrior, with a fey, unseemly lust for battle.

Inside his uncle’s house the family sat ashen and speechless. Johann, Grede; his uncle Jakob and his aunt Elisabeth; Peter’s cousin Jakob and his thick, slow bride. The children—future, hope—had all been bustled off into back rooms. It was impossible to say what course the kaiser and the pope would take in answer. Fust slid to his knees, and everybody followed. He did not lead, but only mouthed a silent prayer.

Grede raised herself the first and put her feet up on a stool. Her hands she held protectively against her barely swollen belly; she was again with child. A servant came with cool mint drinks and bread and meat. Flies buzzed and buzzed above the untouched food.

There would be meetings, of the city council and the traders and the guilds, in the Rathaus and the Kaufhaus and at Mompasilier, inside the Little Court, the Schreibhaus, and at Dietrich’s central palace at Aschaffenburg—in all the abbeys and the churches of the archdiocese, the empire, all of Christendom, there would be voices raised, debating now.

Friedrich III, first king, now kaiser, burst into tears on learning the appalling news, they heard. They could not count on him to lead: he was a weak-willed man, too lily-livered even to forsake his court in Wiener Neustadt and come meet his own archbishops in the Reich. This Jakob said; Peter’s father nodded. The pope had no control: the city-states of Italy were all at war, as England was with France. They knew too well how all the German dukes and princes warred.

And in that void, who then would rise to their defense? Grimly the merchants and the guildsmen stiffened. The trading routes would close, if they were not already shut: the fleets from Genoa and Venice that ferried silk and spice down through the Bosphorus were commandeered, no doubt, or sunk. There’d be no cloves from Araby, no fabrics from the East, no lapis from the Afghan mines, and certainly no eastern markets for Mainz linen or Mainz wine.

They saw in their minds’ eyes the blood-red wave of conquest rolling over Europe’s eastern flank: eradicating Cyprus, the Knights Templar in their island fastness, Rhodes; spreading like a stain from Greece across the Balkans into Hungary, lapping at the boot of Italy, menacing Saint Peter’s rock in Rome.

“We’ll soon be levied,” Jakob said. “Though where the pope thinks we will find it, I don’t know.”

“Not in Aschaffenburg.” Fust grimaced. “Whatever army Dietrich raises, he’ll take out of our hides.”

“
If
he raises an army,” Jakob said.

Peter pictured that huge languid head, its pale blue eyes. He’d never stick out his own neck: already months ago he had refused the pope’s call for another tithe.

“He wouldn’t dare refuse.” Fust looked genuinely shocked. “He could not fail to aid the church.”

Bitterly his brother smiled. “He does not give a damn.”

The smile was one they came to know in the ensuing weeks and months: of mirthless irony, and mockery, and self-defeat.

What good was government? Peter asked himself. What good those lords and masters, if they couldn’t at the very least assure the safety of the people in their lands?

“If he refuses, then at least he won’t take men and horses.” Grede leaned slightly forward, turning her white face toward Peter.

“True.” Fust too looked at his son. “At least for now.” He dipped his fingers in a bowl of water and wiped his forehead. “But God has acted for a reason. We’ll have to act as well, and soon.”

Peter knew by the way Grede looked at him that she wondered if he’d thought of Anna first in those sharp, awful instants on the square. His old friend did her best to read him still. Yet if she’d dared to ask, he would have had to disappoint her. He did not think of Anna then—nor had he, in the months since she had fled, appalled, except from time to time to marvel with a cold, hard mirth at how effectively the will of God was exercised, down to the smallest detail.

This miracle was never his to share.

This Bible was not his, nor Gutenberg’s, nor even Fust’s—but God’s.

In the first days, when, scorched and reeling, he’d reached out to her and tried to make her see, she had refused him. Such was his reward for breaking vows and baring soul and speaking truth. He’d written once again, and still received no answer; he had resolved to write no more.

Grede remonstrated with him, telling him that it was nothing more than a young girl’s superstition. It was that unknown, fear-filled world of letters: magic, potent in their strangeness and their power. But Peter saw it otherwise. The weak—corrupted, lacking faith—must all be punished.

Let others quake and mewl. He understood at last the Lord’s design. He bowed himself, a tempered thing passed through the fire, a hardened tool at God’s command.

The western powers held their breaths throughout the barren weeks and months that followed. Rain did not fall; the crops failed then, as if the Lord had also ordered nature to deprive them of all comfort. Word came of refugees that swarmed the Adriatic ports, emaciated, crawling from the stinking holds. The pestilence crept back with them, oozing up the river valleys, bringing its black marks of death—as if that dark avenging angel too must feed upon the weakened
corpus
of the world.