Gutenberg's Apprentice (31 page)

“By then the Austrian will be long gone.” Klaus smiled, a little lighter now. “It stands to reason, anyway,” he paused, “that we look out for ours.” He could not stop himself from glancing at the son he might have had.

He hoped to cut a deal with Markus, plainly: have the painting done right there, and not at Weydenbach’s a few doors down. Fust made a noncommittal noise.

“A shame, I mean,” Klaus kept on, “to spread the benefits too far afield.”

“When you could keep it underneath this roof, you mean.”

“It shouldn’t make much difference to your partner.”

Fust’s face went hard. “This has no bearing on that work.”

“You get what’s yours, eh? The old sinner gets what’s his?” The wink, the tone, were both much too familiar.

“I do not grasp your meaning.”

Klaus licked his lips. “Just that—he bought a vat of linseed oil last week, for some new project, as he said.” He turned toward Peter. “I couldn’t think what he would do with it—with metal, anyway, if you get my meaning.” He made a little motion with his finger, to show he knew about those pilgrim mirrors. “Herr Gutenberg was winking and grinning, like he does, you know—like it was something big.”

The sound in Peter’s throat was incredulity—a croak he barely managed to conceal as a brief laugh. Fust did not move a muscle; he was a trader after all, extremely skilled in feinting and dissimulation. “The man is brimming with mad notions,” he said drily.

And then they drank a little more, his father measuring a decent interval until he rose. “I’m grateful for the hospitality,” he said, and took his cap up from the table, “and for the news.”

Klaus watched them, brows knit, as they stepped outside. He was still watching as Fust plunged into the swirl of bodies on the Leichhof, weaving with a brusque efficiency along the slick dark streets, his back erect, tight-lipped. Peter had to speed to catch him. The vat of suspect oil, the surging crowd, merged in his mind—became a gleaming canvas by a Flemish master, thick with busy workers and wild dancers and a prancing fool. What new insanity could Gutenberg be planning now?

Fust waited until they had climbed up to his office and shut the door. “You’ll tell me everything.” He stood solid and unmoving.

“I know as much as you.”

His father’s eyes were contemptuous. “Then you are hardly master, are you?” He spun, disgusted, flinging his cloak down. “What you don’t know could fill a cargo ship.”

“I can’t control him—no one can,” said Peter quietly.

“More’s the pity.” Fust stood moodily, his hands clasped at the back. He turned to Peter and gazed out on the trading floor.

“It must be something for the archbishop,” he said at last, as he turned back, his face bereft of all expression. Loss had left his once-round jowls as slack and sagging as a hound’s. “Erlenbach’s in Mainz, you know. Sniffing around.”

Peter’s stomach tightened.

“He wouldn’t dare,” he said, half to himself—meaning the master, not Erlenbach, Archbishop Dietrich’s man-at-arms. His father shook his head; he looked upon him with a mixture of disgust and pity.

“You are a fool to trust him. As was I.”

Perhaps, his son thought. God preserve us, if you’re right.

“What is his business? Erlenbach’s?”

Fust grimaced. “Tax, more tax. He’s leaning hard on the cathedral chapter.”

Dietrich could not simply wave his hand and squeeze the people dry; he needed the approval of the priests of his cathedral to do that. Was it still possible his people had not learned of Gutenberg’s technique? Lord keep them blinded, Peter prayed: just keep them grubbing like blind moles for gold.

“Can Jakob keep him well away?”

“It isn’t Jakob who concerns me,” Fust replied.

“It may just be some decoy plan.”

Fust’s nostrils whitened. “A vat of oil.” He stared at Peter, thinking. “What kind of decoy do you make with that?” He pulled the folds of flesh around his neck, then let them go, hand curling tightly in a fist he weighed against his lips.

“I need to know.” Each word was clipped. “You will find out, and send me word.” His fist shook lightly, as if weighing dice. “I couldn’t answer for my actions if I had to see the man.”

Gutenberg was there before his foreman the next day. He sprang and turned as Peter entered. It was a shock to find him sitting at the desk Peter had claimed; there was never a soul astir before cockcrow but him and the boy who laid the fire. Peter loved the silence of the early morning, its steadying before the crew converged. But not that winter dawn, when Gutenberg leapt up and strode toward him, waving something in his hand.

Peter had barely slept, his mind engaged in pouring tainted vats and filling them, repouring then refilling, all the sticky, fitful night. And now came that old reprobate, a curl of glee upon his lips, pushing some pages at him.

“A brilliant morning, I would say.” The master shook the pamphlet eagerly. Take, open, his eyes said, praise me, exclaim!

“A vat of oil.” Peter brushed the sheaf away. “‘Some big new project,’ which we hear about in gossip.”

Gutenberg drew back, then up, the eager look replaced by one of haughtiness. “I’m saving your damned shirts.” He’d never been a man to quail: he thrust the papers into Peter’s hand.

It was a lengthy poem in verse—the kind of tripe you could pick up for pennies on the square. An epic—no, an ode, in close-writ lines that stretched for many pages.
The Sibylline Prophecy
.

“Doggerel,” said Peter.

“A solemn prophecy, in noble verse.” One corner of the master’s mouth was lifted. “The ancient wisdom of the Sibyls.”

“You plan to print this.” Peter looked into that crafty face, those glowing, canine eyes. The man was mad then, after all.

“A certain winner, I would say”—the master’s coy look widened to a smile—“to calm the people at this fearful time.”

He prattled on: the prospects were incredible, the text was tailor-made for such a time. It told the story of the coming of a peaceful king, who’d crush the hounds of hell and save believers from eternal flame. “The monarch’s name”—he winked—“is even Friedrich.

“They’ll lap it up!” The fire had reignited in his eyes. “We’ll get enough to cover all the outlays.”

Peter’s pulse was beating in his ears. He could not speak at first. It was a madness even greater than the madman Gutenberg could birth. If Dietrich, in the tumult of reform and war, had pushed the matter of their bookwork from his mind, he only needed a reminder—slight, and made with metal type—for the whole business to flood back.

“You would risk everything,” he hissed. “Have you no notion what a book like this would do?”

“Save our backsides, fool.” The master’s lips were twisted; he lunged to grab the prophecy, but Peter held it tight.

“As well announce our business by the crier,” Peter spat. He hoped to hell the man remembered his own words.

Discovery was death, the end. For months he’d thought of little else: what Rosenberg, and Dietrich—Erlenbach—might do, if they discovered that extensive workshop underneath their noses. It hardly mattered whether they conceived the press as heresy or boon. They might perceive it as a thing that they could seize and use, or else they’d see it as a threat to the scriptoria whose proceeds kept the landed cloisters fat and ripe for skimming. Either was conceivable. Incredibly, Archbishop Dietrich had not yet grasped what this technique could do—for if he had, by now he surely would have swooped.

“The instant you produce another book, they’ll fall upon us. Come crashing in, and—”

Gutenberg cut in sharply. “What will it take for you to understand? The well is dry. The purse is empty. Your father made that more than clear.”

“You cannot threaten the whole Bible just for the thirty, forty guilders it might yield.” The man was arrogant, just lunatic enough to risk it all. Peter bent his force and will against it. “Nor use this paper—it’s a miracle already no one’s noticed.” He moved a step toward him. “He will discover us, for certain.”

“Do not speak of what you do not know.” The master’s smile was mocking. “His Grace is ill. Extremely so. A great misfortune for him—although not for me, nor for the doctor he hauled in at a vast cost from Holland.” He snorted, rolled his eyes. “You do the job for which you’re paid, and leave affairs of state to me.” He held his hand out for the pamphlet.

It took only a moment to scratch out a note and send it to the Kaufhaus. Some fifteen minutes later, Fust arrived. From the composing room they could not see, but each of them heard clearly.

“I have a rack of bones to pick with you, Johann.”

There was a pause; the master took his time in rising. “It’s good to see you, too, my friend.”

Then they went upstairs, and the compositors bent back to work. Inside a minute they heard voices rising, accusations bouncing off the floorboards. “Sabotage,” they heard, and “folly.” And then the master’s testy voice: “For God’s sake, let it be, Johann.”

“Finally met his match.” Hans cocked his head and grinned.

Peter thought of Anna, she of the Iron Door. Those brothers back in Strassburg, with their mirrors and their plague. The hapless clerk of Mainz whom Gutenberg had seized some twenty years before. He’d always pushed against the rules—and anybody fool enough to try to block his path.

Fust’s face was set when he descended. Peter stepped out, on the pretense of some work he had to place on the composing stone. He understood, as they threw charges, countercharges, at each other on the stairs, that Fust refused, point-blank, to free up any member of “his” crew for this new work.

That night Fust told his son, as well, that he’d demanded an accounting of the workshop’s income and expenses for the past two years. He’d paid the sums he’d pledged; there was no earthly reason they should fall short now. Where had the money gone? He’d like to know. If Gutenberg persisted in this folly, he’d pay himself for any ink and paper that he used. The point was, none of it could interfere, in any wise, with their last push to finish up the Bible.

“He claims,” said Fust, his blue eyes sharp, “that you’ll be done inside six months.”

The man would promise anything.

It was early Advent, a whole lifetime until Easter and midsummer. Each setter still had five or six quires left to do, each one of which might take a month. And over all that time, the workshop would be vulnerable. Peter had to keep them safe, he realized. He had to save their secret somehow.

He too could plan a subterfuge.

He ordered Keffer to produce two hundred pilgrim mirrors, using Hans’s old mold. And then he reached up to the master’s shelf for those old sample sheets, the canticles he’d set and printed for the pope’s pontifical. Within a week or two they would be starting with the printing of the Psalms. It would be easy to print off some extra sheets, as if they truly made that book of papal prayers that Gutenberg had once proposed.

Peter did not tell the master. Nor was Gutenberg around to see the metal poured to make those pilgrim badges. Barred by Fust from using workers from their common shop, he went back to the first press he had made, still standing in his stable. He’d make the bloody prophecy himself, he growled—or find some willing hands to do it. While Keffer poured the mirrors, Peter kept the Bible pages flowing. The stories that those pages told that final winter were of portent and of lamentation: the books of Daniel and of Jeremiah and of Job.

The torments that God poured upon his faithful servant preyed on Peter’s mind. Job’s suffering and isolation were extraordinary, epic—yet they struck a chord in his own soul. Over and over the phrase recurred to him like an old song—what Job’s poor servant said, returning with each tale of woe: “And I alone have escaped to tell thee.”

CHAPTER 6

APPARITIONS

        
[37.5 quires of 65]

        
December 1453

T
HE BOOKS OF PROPHECY began appearing one by one, like random snowflakes through the Adventide. None paid them any notice at the start. Books usually appeared this way, a copy here, a copy there—until the copies started clustering, drifting into noticeable little piles.

The first to wonder in his father’s hearing were the traders on the Kaufhaus floor. The wives of Salman and Kumoff had each bought a pamphlet from an urchin near St. Martin’s. This in itself might have passed unremarked. But what was strange was how alike they were, said Kumoff—like peas in pods—and more than that, the boy had more, and there were others, they had heard, for sale inside the Schreibhaus.

“I told him scribes were just as hard up now as anybody else,” Fust said. Peter reached to take the copy that his father held.

“How many, at what price?” he asked.

“Five shillings each. God knows how many, though. A score? A hundred? More?”

The prophecy made fourteen pages. If Gutenberg had scared up a whole ream of paper, he could make several hundred, Peter reckoned, using Keffer and Ruppel, pulled after hours to do the work back at the Hof zum Gutenberg. He hadn’t had the heart to block them when the men had begged to earn the little extra that the master offered.

“He’d better watch how many he puts out,” Fust said, chewing his lip.

Yet he’d not easily resist temptation—not if he thought that he could dredge up twenty, thirty guilders. “He might have shown us,” Peter said, and opened the slim poem.

“He didn’t dare.”

Small wonder: the thing was nasty and cheap, type badly inked and letters lurching on their feet. Whoever set it had not even tried to justify the lines. He’d used their first poor type, in its last gasp, not for a Latin schoolbook, but
auf Deutsch
: the
v
’s stood in for all those
w
’s no Latin book required.

“A waste of rag.”

“Apparently they’re selling.”

Peter tossed it on the desk. “He’ll draw attention to us, far too soon.”

Feet drumming on the stairs stopped up their mouths; there was a sharp knock at the door. As Fust was saying, “Enter,” Jakob’s head appeared. His eyes went right to Peter. “Well, well,” he said, stepping inside. “Look what the cat dragged in.”