Gutenberg's Apprentice (28 page)

They stood, and Peter reached his hand. But Gutenberg had started shambling round the table like some old demented bear, reaching his arms around him—briefly, awkwardly, as if he did not in the least know how to do it.

Peter left his hand upon one shoulder when the master dropped his and sprang back. “I owe you—,” he began to say.

“All well and good.” The master’s voice was gruff. “We’ll count it up above.”

Hans said he’d seen it coming a mile off. Gutenberg got bored, he said; he started itching for the next thing once the tricky parts were past. Not to take a jot from you, he quickly added: come to think of it, they’d never yet got to the end of anything the man had started. Nor did it seem that any of the other men had dreams of standing in the master’s shoes. There wasn’t much to gain from it, so far as they could see. It was in many ways a thankless task.

When Peter thinks back on that time, he sees himself alone, a solitary figure like the one upon the master’s family seal, bent underneath its burden. Weeks passed without a sign of either partner. The three of them were like the figures on the tower clock: racing past but never touching, never meeting, only pausing when the bells were struck, then off again to trace their lonely circuits.

Thank God he had the crew. Right away Keffer opined they ought to celebrate down at the Mallet. As his first act as foreman, Peter overruled him. Besides, the tavern would be shut when they had finished with their shift at cockcrow, he had claimed. In fact the problem was, the shop was getting porous. The bell of silence that the guilds observed had cracks; as their numbers grew, their secret had become that much more fragile. Recently his cousin Jakob had accosted him, half-crocked in the lane. “Time’s a-wasting,” he had slurred; that shop of theirs had smelted lead enough to line a hundred coffins. God, or else the devil, knew what weapon they were forging, but they’d better get a move on. Mainz could use their help right now.

The crew therefore assembled at the break of day upstairs, to consecrate their newly elevated master.

“To second winds,” said Hans, and started pouring.

“And second halves.” Peter unfurled the chart and pinned it on the wall. Why not enlist them, he had thought, and let them know how far they’d come, how far they all still had to go? The men all looked and found their names, and traced the quires that marched in a long row beside them.

“Second books too, I would wager.” Keffer’s feet were on the table as he rubbed his eyes.

“You said that years ago,” said Peter, laughing.

“Still.” The pressman shrugged. “I’d like to know what he is up to.”

“I’m only glad he didn’t hand it off to me,” said Hans, and stepped up spritely on a stool. He rapped his mug to get attention. “Now,” he said, “look sharp. I guess I’ll have to do the
Brudermeister’s
duty.” He nicked his chin at Peter. “The man’s no master till he’s baptized, eh?”

He jumped back down, and Keffer, Ruppel, and the rest all stood, except the Bechtermünzes, who looked on, amazed. The table they shoved to one side; then all six rolled the sleeves of their right arms. Hans beckoned Peter to the edge of the ring they formed in the middle of the room.

Each man stretched out his hand and placed it over Hans’s, until all six stood linked, their arms connected like the six spokes on the city’s wheel.

Keffer reached to fill a cup with his left hand, and placed it on the topmost mitt. They started singing then, and raised their arms as they began to turn, lifting as they turned the tilting, sloshing cup. The great wheel spun as they all shuffled, moving clockwise in the age-old drinking song that ended with the journeyman’s or master’s bath. When all their arms were well above their ears, the man to be anointed ducked into the circle and looked up, and braced himself for the last bellowed “To our fellow!” Six arms heaved up the cup and scattered, leaving Peter, face upturned, eyes closed, legs braced, mouth wide to imbibe the brandy as it plunged.

The tumbler clocked him in the cheek, but he was quick enough to grab it and to slurp what had not spilled. “Silver sounds much better,” he called, grinning, spinning, showering them with the last drops. The Bechtermünzes were still gaping, ignorant of goldsmiths’ ways—until they too were plied with schnapps.

They laughed and guzzled half the day; Peter wondered once if they would pay when it came time to work again that night. But they so rarely got a chance to take their ease or tell bad jokes or tap their toes to Keffer’s flute. He owed them that, at least.

Heading toward the outhouse, he crossed paths with Mentelin. The sun was blazing; Peter’s head felt hollow. They balanced on a trough and let the heat scorch the fatigue away.

“Salve,”
said the gold-scribe, squinting at him and holding out one hand. “If that is what I ought to say.”

“I never asked for it.” Peter looked beyond him, blinded by the brightness. “I only thought about the task at hand.”

“I noticed that about you.”

Peter smiled. He was fanatical—perfectionist, he knew. He looked as closely as he could into those green and slitted eyes. “I have to take it as God’s will.”

Mentelin was nodding. “That’s what I told myself when I met Gutenberg.” Something in his tone made Peter ask. “You don’t believe it now?”

“I think the Lord must have a sense of humor”—he scratched his freckled face—“to put His faith in such a man.”

It hit Peter suddenly: Gutenberg was gone. “I’ll need your help,” he said. “If we are going to make it.”

Mentelin looked at him levelly. “I have no doubt.”

“I wish I shared your confidence.”

“‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God,’” the gold-scribe said.

“Isaiah.”

“I set it yesterday.”

“And I’m to drive the coach,” said Peter, standing and stretching as he moved toward the door. And wield the lash, he thought but did not say.

“Perhaps the Book will drive itself,” said Mentelin.

“Perhaps.”

CHAPTER 3

CRUSADE

        
[24.5 quires of 65]

        
September–October 1453

A
MEAGER HARVEST CAME. And in the midst of that undoing of the world, Peter Schoeffer led the men. The books at which they labored were these six: Numbers, Chronicles, Isaiah, Saint Matthew, Joshua, and Ezra. The two partners were dispersed and wandering they knew not where. The workshop was an ark, its stout walls battened as it sailed across the rising waters.

He took the master’s desk but not his way, and without question not his title. Peter, they had always called him, and they called him still. Except that now from time to time he heard Johann Mentelin joke softly as he passed, “There goes the Rock.” And it was true that he was cool, not hot: not warm to the new men, but not explosive and unpredictable as Gutenberg had been. The weight upon his shoulders was as heavy as the mountaintops of Zion: he alone could see them in the distance, count the miles.

On the last day of September, Archbishop Dietrich formally pronounced the pope’s decree. Nicholas V ordered Crusade against the Turk. All Christendom would come together to repel the heathen foe. Inside the workshop Peter fiddled with the setting of the book of Ezra, fixing errors made by Heinrich Bechtermünze. Ezra’s verses weren’t just prophecies, but answers to the hidden meanings of Creation. He read them with great avidness; it seemed to him their present fate was just as grim as any he had set in Genesis. God had crushed the city of Saint Constantine, as He had rained the brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and unleashed the Flood. “I will teach thee whence a wicked heart is,” Ezra said: God teaches through His punishments.

Peter took the finished pages to the storeroom and tucked them under canvas, and then locked the door. The only hope was faith—true faith, like that of Noah, or of Job, he thought, the Word of God the only bulwark in the storm.

The master had cheek, pretending that he handed him a thing that ran without a hitch. As soon as he took over, Peter saw it was a lie. The Bechtermünzes struggled to complete half a page a day; the third press idled. Keffer and Ruppel were accustomed to a lengthy lubricated break while they waited for the ink on their respective pages to be dry enough to print the other side. That staggering would have to go—two able setters for each press meant there should never be a moment when they slacked, except to break for food or water. “Killjoy,” Keffer muttered with a lowered brow and half a smile, as if to probe how far their camaraderie extended. But Peter remained stone-faced, his eyes unfixed and distant, reviewing those machines, the hands that fed them, and the hands in turn assigned to feed those hands.

“Saint Peter,” they began to call him, mockingly.

Yet Peter did not ask them anything he did not ask himself. He still arrived before dawn’s light to start his daily page and did not turn to any business of the shop until those four-and-eighty lines were lying in their tray. He rarely took a break except to wolf down bread that Mentelin blessed each noontime. As darkness came, each day a little sooner, he had the candles lit; he always was the one to snuff them out and climb the last upstairs to bed. He led by his example. The person he had been before—as easy with a smile, a joke, as any other man—was purged. His calling now was vital, holy—terrible, if truth were told.

They hardly knew him, Hans said, some weeks into it. “For Christ’s sake, slow it down.” It was for Christ’s sake, Peter answered, smiling strangely, with a distance that his friends had noticed growing. “Right,” the smith went on, his short legs planted. “Then you had better listen up.” The pace was crazy—even worse his constant presence, like a ghoul behind them even when they ate or crapped or, God forgive them, tried to catch a wink. Henne had the grace at least to leave them be at night. Hans grabbed him by the shoulder and lightly shook him. “He’s right,” said Mentelin. “Go home at night, and let the poor men breathe.”

Your father’s wife and children would be glad of it, they said. And they were right. It was a hard time, and a frightening one, to be a woman by herself in a fine house. Fust in his letters had already asked Peter more than once to take good care of them, although he’d held back from requesting that he move back to the Haus zur Rosau.

In part Peter kept his distance out of pride—or else his wounded vanity, perhaps. He knew that Grede would always try to pry him open, bring his heart to speech, put right whatever had transpired between him and Anna. Since Grede had learned, he’d seen her now and then in conversation with the painter’s daughter at the market stalls. But all of that was past, and ash. The moons had come and gone between, and Peter feared nothing now except the failing of his monumental task.

His old room was unchanged. The children seemed to have grown overnight into grave and wide-eyed things. Tina especially, at eight, no longer let him guide her hand, but shook her curls and made the letters by herself. The Sabbath afternoons with Fust away were just as they had always been. Grede liked, as ever, to be read to while she stitched. She moved more slowly now, somnolent in her pregnancy, although her eyes and tongue were just as sharp. She asked him to read to her from
The Little Flowers of Saint Francis
: fifty or sixty tales,
Floretum
gathered by a Tuscan monk that told how the Franciscans came to be, and of Saint Francis’s piety and poverty and all the miracles he’d wrought.

“An interesting choice,” Peter answered with a smile. “I would not call this a Franciscan house.” She threw a silk pillow at him and said he had no call for carping at her, high and mighty now though he might be. Besides, she liked the stories of the life of Brother Juniper the best, that simple peasant who forever played the fool, abasing himself and rejoicing when the world held him in contempt.

“To be despised and mocked then, here on earth,” said Peter, taking up the little book, “is to be favored by our Lord?”

He read the tale to her of how poor Juniper stripped to his underclothes, parading through the city, drawing jeers and rocks and kicks. “The lower that he sank,” he read, “the purer was his own humility.” He looked at Grede and laughed.

“There’s nothing wrong with humility, you know,” she said and flashed her eyes.

“I never said there was.”

“Yet you are strange.” She frowned, head tilted, dark eyes sober. “You keep so much inside.”

She could not see—had still not grasped how he was changed and raised. He looked on her and felt a kind of pity.

“The humble, as you full well know,” she said, “will be rewarded long before the rich.”

“Then you had best begin distributing these jewels.” He said it calmly.

“You wouldn’t be so—cold. If you knew how she pines for you.” Grede put her sewing down and leaned toward him. “She wrote to you, but you have still not answered—is that true?”

“Truth.” It was a joke. “I thought it truthful not to lie. My great mistake.” He shrugged. “I would not do it now.”

She stared at him a moment. Then she looked down and smoothed her skirt and cleared her throat. “It’s not too late.” She leaned toward him, low voice urgent. “She was afraid; it brings her shame. She sees it now.”

“It is of little consequence.” Peter stood and put the book back on its shelf. “Though you may tell her, if you like, I wish her well.”

“That’s all?” Her face was white, and strangely twisted.

He saw the steeples shining whitely and the soaring towers of God’s City sometimes, in his mind.

“Where I must go,” he said, and touched her on the hand, “I doubt that anyone can follow.”

He was sitting at the table upstairs at the Humbrechthof, reviewing distribution of the quires, when the first man came demanding monies due. Hans came galumphing up, his composing cap in hand. “I don’t know how he knew,” he said, “but there’s a herdsman at the door what claims we owe him twenty guilders.”

The man stood in the lane outside, just at the portal to the courtyard, with a skinny youth beside him. He shifted on his hobnail boots; a bit of straw was caught in his brown beard. “Don’t like to do it, sir,” he said, “but winter’s coming on.” His skin was grooved and brown as an old nut, and Peter felt the range wind scouring till the herder was entirely polished, one with his long staff of yew.