Gutenberg's Apprentice (30 page)

Men weep behind a mask, as he well knew. That year he watched his father’s belt grow slack, what hair remained go purely white. Gone was the paunch, the ready smile, the ornamented jacquards: in their place emerged a stranger, hollow-eyed and somber, hand lifted to the heavy crucifix he wore now at his neck.

It wasn’t just this one cruel loss. It was all of a piece, it seemed to Peter: the drying up of trade, the weight of all that Bible debt, the certainty of holy war. The papal bull was tacked up on St. Martin’s portal: the pope required all able-bodied men to muster for Crusade. No soul could hope to be exempt; any who hesitated would be jailed and excommunicated.

Yet Fust had taken this news too with apathy—as he took everything in those dark days. He hardly stirred outside the Kaufhaus, and did not even come to check their progress at the shop. Although it stung him, Peter did his best to understand. His father had buried a child and wife before, and bowed before God’s will—then God had smiled, and brought him Grede and Tina, little Hans. Why then did this loss, after those others, hold such lethal force?

Old Lothar turned to Peter finally, and said his father barely slept, or ate. “Reason with him if you would, young master.” He shook his rutted, faithful head. Peter begged his father to remember that the Lord had spared his wife. She would come back; the only balm for certain wounds was time.

“Don’t speak to me of grace,” was all Fust answered.

The fear of losing her, of losing all—his business, and his books, the freedom of the open road—had wormed its way into his heart. It was as if everything he’d built, and all he’d reached for, was suddenly fragile and in danger of collapse. Always before there’d been an order and a sense, but now the sultan’s hand had throttled his whole livelihood, and God himself had turned His back.

CHAPTER 5

ILLUMINATION

        
[34.5 quires of 65]

        
Late November 1453

A
PAINTER CAME to Mainz that bleak November, traveling as those roving brush-men did from
Residenz
to monastery, patrician home to ducal hearth. The penning of new manuscripts and painting of their margins still went on, of course. This man, an Austrian, lodged with the painter Pinzler on the Leichhof, Peter heard. Apparently he hoped to get some painting work on the new Bible being written by the monks at St. Viktor’s.

And in the Humbrechthof they had at last hit the halfway mark. They were not far off now from Psalms, which Gutenberg had chosen as the end of the first volume. The text was far too massive to bind in one book; they’d split it into two. So it was time, thought Peter, going to his father and saying it out loud: time now to think about illumination of the copies Fust had planned.

Right at the start, his father told them he had seen it in a dream. He saw a row of printed pages on a trestle, then a brush—a painter coloring a dozen copies with the selfsame leaves, the same bright birds and flowers. Just as Gutenberg had made the text identical, Fust would hire a painter who would decorate the Bible with identical motifs. A few to start, to see how they would sell—then more, if the new men of means were pleased to buy a book complete and ready-made.

The beauty of illumination, if nothing else, had always worked a certain magic in his father’s heart. Peter prayed it might again have this effect. This painter was in competition with the local artists from the Cherry Orchard workshop run by Weydenbach, he said; it was a perfect chance to view the two contrasting styles. Fust, haggard, old now, simply shrugged. He had no interest in the local style. “Though it is plain enough,” he dully added, “whom you would have me hire.”

Pinzler’s sons, Anna’s brothers, worked in that local workshop. Peter saw her jars of unguents and glues, the little curtain to the kitchen and her mother’s loom. “Not necessarily.” He shut the door inside his mind. “It’s up to you.

“Indulge me,” he went on, cajoling. “Let Klaus arrange a viewing.”

Fust cocked his head. Thinner, he resembled Jakob, with his wary and pugnacious look. “So long as Gutenberg is not invited.”

Peter looked at him intently. “I shouldn’t think it would be necessary.”

Fust pursed his lips and nodded. It still rankled, the words they’d had, the costs of that third press, the four new workers—but most of all it was the fear, which Peter shared: the sense that everything now dangled by the slimmest thread.

“A little air,” he said, and gently touched Fust’s elbow. “A little brushwork will do wonders.”

Peter sent a note to Pinzler to arrange it. There might be something in it for the painter too, he wrote. What the man might think of him did not disturb his mind. Nine months ago he’d almost been betrothed—now he was not. The Lord of Hosts determined all: no part of it was really in their human hands. The Book just ran and ran into a smoky distance, dragging him behind it, and the crew. A week before, Mentelin had finished the last pages of Isaiah, the Salvation book. Repent, or face destruction, was its cry. Those without faith will not endure. Peter’s only mission was the driving and the steering of this pounding team: three presses and six setters, trampling through the sinning, bloodstained world. Making the highway straight, he said inside himself: the highway of the Lord.

The Austrian was slight and weather-bitten, with one squinting eye. Klaus Pinzler clasped Fust’s hand and led them to the table, cleared and pushed up to the fire. Markus, Anna’s brother, had her nut-brown hair and a look of cautious query in his eyes. Beside him, she stood. Anna. She looked older. How long, one year—two?—since he had come here that first time? How was it he had come again, what was the Lord’s intent? All things have their season, Peter thought:
A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

“Gracious of you, in such weather.” Klaus gave Fust the cushioned chair.

A little flush described an arc along her neck’s left side. Formally, Peter Schoeffer bowed. Markus leaned and spread some quires. “Depending on the job, we’d vary certain shades,” he said, and fanned some pages from that new handwritten Bible.

Peter had told them only that his father sought a painter for a book. He hoped to keep it just that vague—although he almost slipped, himself, right then and there.

The paper of that written Bible was the very same that they were using in the Humbrechthof. The same cream linen with its wavy chain lines and the ox-head watermark, identical—a pointed shape that looked more like a fox’s than an ox’s head. The very same, from the same molds in the same mill along the river Po: discomfort, then suspicion, needled him inside. Sharply he looked at Markus, who was telling Fust that Archbishop Dietrich had commissioned this new Bible; they’d just finished a new psalter for him, too. Petrus Heilant, Peter thought: he was the scribe who ran this Bible job. What were the chances that the paper handler’d talked—made some remark as he was selling the same batch to both the master and the monk? Peter’s skin crawled as he watched the artist’s fingers trace the vibrant colors of the borders. The fact of two big clients in the same small place would be remarkable; he made a note to pry it out of Gutenberg.

The job he had in mind, Fust said, was for half a dozen books, each painted more or less the same. He sat and scrutinized the painted margins. Peter watched him breathe the pigment in, his nostrils flaring, body warming to the beauty and the craft. He saw the way his fingers traced the lines. This was beyond all else what Fust, the merchant, had bequeathed to him, he thought: for all that his foster father was a man of commerce, he had been born and raised a craftsman. He did not lack for finer feeling.

That written Bible was a handsome thing: the lettering was fluid, the decoration in the standard Cherry Orchard style of branching bowers filled with buds and birds. Their flowers were orange or red, white-hatched; they used the leaves of the acanthus, indigo or green. The style was graceful, calm, though to his eye—and to his father’s and to Anna’s, Peter knew—too rote and filled with gold-flecked preening. “I see now why His Grace approves your work.” Fust gave an enigmatic smile.

Without intending to, Peter glanced at Anna. Her eyes were on him; for an instant he could feel the torrent they unleashed. If they had been alone, he knew she would have scorned that work. With pity—after all, her brothers labored there. But he had heard her more than once dismiss it as mere shiny surface, just copied from a pattern book. Repetitive, identical—just like those metal letters he had shown her.

All he had offered her. All she had spurned. Peter looked back down.

His mistake had been to think that she was like him—born of this clay, yet able to rise out of it somehow. He felt her eyes still on him, prickling. His face felt taut: he was intensely conscious of that beam of her attention, like a thread across the table, stitching at his skin. Again he glanced up, and the tension broke. She looked away; she could not bear his gaze.

Markus gathered up his sheets. Casually Peter asked how many pages the whole Bible made. Around a thousand, was the answer. He nodded, galled inside—to have to gaze at this, and yet be barred from showing off the wonder of its freshly printed rival.

The Austrian gave a small cough and nudged his papers forward. They were samples only, he explained; the works of course remained inside the abbeys and the castles he had served. “You name the thing, I’ve colored it,” he said, his mouth a crooked line. “Choir books, land grants, books of hours, and Bibles too. I heard you had a big one here.”

Fust pursed his lips, then opened the worn sheets. He sat unmoving for a while, staring at a strange and gleaming thicket. This artist’s vines were hung with spiky leaves, in shades of silvered green, gray slate. He turned the page, to find the same wild bushiness upon the next sheet, and the next. The man possessed a queer and otherworldly style: Peter had never seen such flowers grow upon this earth as bloomed upon those pages. His large initials used less gilding than the Mainzers’; he formed them out of patterns flecked with dots. Here and there he’d dropped in figures—monkeys, saints—that were more awkward, less successful. The Pinzlers looked on silently, and Peter tasted sourness in the air.

“You must have stumbled into nettles once.” His father clucked his tongue.

The painter kept his sad eyes fastened on the man who might, with luck, become a client. Fust was peering down, evidently charmed by, or at the very least intrigued at, those barbed and writhing lines. “Nettles, aye.”

“I’ve tried to paint more true to life.” The painter spread his fingers, long and tapered as an angel’s. “But never seem quite able.”

“You have then, like the others, some pattern that you follow?”

“Just in my mind.”

Fust raised his head and eyed the fellow. “You were last in Würzburg, am I right?”

“I was.”

“And painted there a Bible.”

“I was one of many hands.”

“Before that?”

“In Bohemia, then Salzburg.”

“I like a man who moves around.”

The Austrian relaxed a bit. “It is an interesting life.”

“You hear things,” Fust said. “I would guess,” and tipped his head at Klaus. Their host rose and came back with wine and glasses.

There wasn’t much about the tramp, at least, for anyone to fancy. His face was weather-blasted, with a glint of animal alertness in his fully opened eye.

“What news is there, then, from the East?” his father asked.

“The heretics encircle Belgrade.”

“Bad news.” Klaus frowned.

“Shields and banners.” Peter looked at Klaus with sympathy. “That’s all that anyone wants painted now.”

Anna’s father drew down his dark brows. “Chests are what you need, and altars, windows, if you want to feed a wife and child.” His tone was sharp.

“And to the south?” Fust kept on.

“A man from Graz said I might like to know there was a mountain of old manuscripts on one ship he saw coming into Venice.”

“From Constantinople?”

“Survivors, aye. The Greeks are fleeing.” The Austrian looked up, around. “Manuscripts of all descriptions, what I heard. They saved some libraries, at least—they say there’re books there none of us have seen.”

“What kind of books?” Fust leaned forward.

“Medicine, geography. Ptolemy and Plato—all of it in Greek.” The painter hitched his shoulders and gave a ghost of a smile.

Fust turned toward Peter; for the first time in long weeks, his eyes began to stir.

The last time anyone had salvaged learning from the East, it had been Cardinal Cusanus. A dozen years before, he’d sailed off to Byzantium, and smuggled treasures from those monasteries that lay crushed now underneath the despot’s boot. What other riches had they salvaged in their flight? Things only ancients knew, which few had seen—except in scribbled Latin copied from the Arabs.

“A silver lining,” Fust said thoughtfully, and then fell silent.

After a time Klaus made a sign; there was a scraping as both painters stood and pushed their chairs back. Fust stood and shook their hands. “The choice is hard,” he said, and tipped his head. Anna stiffly curtseyed, and then they all withdrew. Her waist was just as slim, her hair as long and shining. Peter wondered if she’d brushed it fifty times, as she had done so long ago for him.

Frau Pinzler came and without a word set down three steins of beer. His father didn’t notice how tight her lips were, nor how she carefully avoided Peter’s eyes.

“It’s good to see you back, Johann,” said Klaus.

“This has been—most enlightening.” Indeed, his son thought: a raft of news.

“Share and share alike.” The painter cut the sausage. “There’s precious little now to go around.”

Fust nodded. “You’ll not get lapis now, nor azurite, but what you can from Cornwall.”

“Won’t matter if the buyers stay this scarce.” Klaus took a quaff. “How soon you think you’ll need him?” Which “him” he meant was clear.

Fust glanced at Peter. “Hard to say,” he said. “A month or two.”