Gutenberg's Apprentice (33 page)

“Four horsemen,” Hans said, deadpan; Peter rolled his eyes. He bid them wait, went out with Wiegand, hoisting him to spy above the wall. “Four, aye,” the boy said, sliding down, “two black, two bay.”

“Which way?”

“St. Martin’s.”

“What livery?”

“I couldn’t see.”

A feeling of tremendous fear swiped through Peter at the very instant they both clearly heard a soft yet rhythmic tapping at the courtyard door. “Quick,” he said, “silent, now, close up the shutters.”

He went with slow, cold feet toward the little door cut in the portal. “Who’s there?” he hissed through solid oak.

“Jost, from Fust,” he heard in a low whisper. “A message, urgently, for Peter Schoeffer.”

As soon as he unlocked the door, a hooded figure slipped inside: his uncle’s foreman, Jost, nodding in recognition. “Erlenbach just rode in, I’m to warn you.” His hood was pulled so tight that Peter barely made out his face. “They know—that’s what he says.” A cloud of mist came from the shadowed lips. “Put everything away, your uncle says.”

There was no sound now in the lane, no clue as to the way those horses and their soldiers might have gone.

“Just here?” said Peter, “or—”

The faintest shrug. “He only sent me here.”

Instantly, he understood. As far as Jakob was concerned, Gutenberg could live or die by his own sword. Peter still could send a warning: the thought was like a bat that darted back and forth as he thanked Jost and dropped the beam across the door. The whole thing was the fool’s own fault, he thought. The Bible and the Humbrechthof were all that counted. Let Dietrich seize the prophecy; it serves the master right. Peter might have sent a boy, but in the instant he was given to decide, he hesitated—then left the man to twist on his own rope.

He flew into the workshop, barking orders. Keffer turned as slowly as a man encased in treacle, sluggish, golden: everything moved with a lethargy, a slowing of time’s motion. “Mirrors, now!” said Peter, and the pressman nodded, cranked the bed back out from underneath the platen. He hoisted out the heavy tray of letters. “To the shed,” said Peter, as he turned to Ruppel and Neumeister.

“You’re making a new psalter, for Pope Nicholas,” he told them. “
Formes
out, now, and follow Keffer to the shed. I’ll bring you the new pages.” Mentelin and Hans were at his side, the only men who knew, had helped prepare the plan. He did not need to tell them what to do. Mentelin was a red flame as he went past, the sample sheets of canticles, a few new pages of the Psalms, hung like limp curtains from his outstretched arms. He set to fanning some on the three tables, one beside each press, as if they’d only just been printed. Hans brayed back by the forge, and Peter went to help him carry in the trays of type, the pages of the Psalms that they had set and printed in the dread that they’d be needed for this very purpose. Peter felt the blood pound in his throat, fear and defiance coursing through his trunk, his neck, his forearms. Everyone was moving, clipped, efficient, without words, their hands, their faces, all intently focused. Peter felt the fiercest pride. Keffer moved the mirror molds onto the workbench. Wiegand grabbed the box of mirrors they had cast already, and dealt them out along the bench like playing cards. Two other boys were towing a full pot of molten metal from the forge.

The worst was the huge flock of drying pages, six hundred great sheets, nearly, hanging from their lines. God spare us, Peter whispered, praying that the ink was halfway dried. He called the whole crew hoarsely to come quickly just as soon as they were done, for this, though massive, was not something they could rush. In haste and panic Peter gestured for more barrels, stools—they did not have a dozen ladders. Up swarmed the hands, like tentacles, like harvesters among the vines: each page was lifted, gently, painfully, so slowly that he thought his heart would burst just watching it, his ear trained on the door. Frau Beildeck had come down, astonished at the strange commotion, and he grasped her by her ruddy arm and begged her to ascend again and watch the lane from up above. Another boy was sent to crouch beside the portal in the courtyard, ears pressed tight to the wood, to sound the first alarm.

Peter left them lifting, laying, jogging finished pages; the boys and men began to stagger off outside, toward the storerooms with those printed piles, one following the other like a trail of ants. Peter was moving like a shuttle through the shop: first to the composing room, removing the torn Bible pages clipped to every setter’s stand; then examining minutely all three presses, reaching under one to pull a fallen waste sheet out. Upstairs he unpinned the large chart that tracked their progress, folded it, and took the bundle—dangerous, revealing—of Bible notes and pages out into the cold.

The track between the workshop door and the two storerooms was now wide and trampled. He heard a muffled sound—at least he thought—and tasted acid in his mouth. The men were grave, entirely silent as they filed, except for a slight huffing and the shuffling of their sodden feet. Peter heard again the muffled sound, of feet, perhaps, not hooves, up north again, along the Cobblers’ Lane in the direction of the synagogue—or Mombasilier, or even, he thought with a twist of guilt, the Hof zum Gutenberg. Brusquely he seized Ruppel by the arm, and wildly motioned that the tracks must be erased; on his way back to fetch more pages, every man now dragged his feet in an uneven circuit, flattening the pale, untrammeled snow. Their manic loops and jets of breath, their panting open mouths, were an inversion, a perversion, of those jolly Flemish winter scenes.

Then there was noise, and indisputably the chink of mail, the sound of heavy leather boots approaching. Peter shooed the crew ferociously toward the workshop door. He bent and locked the storehouse, and stood an instant with his head flung back, his face exposed to ice and snow. “Saint Michael defend us against the rulers of this world of darkness,” he whispered to the cloak of heaven, moving then with such a speed as he had never done before into the shop, looking upon the men—his men, by God—each taking his appointed place, Hans and Mentelin bent with rags behind each man to wipe the melted mush that trailed in from the door.

They had a minute, at the most, before the archbishop’s men arrived. Peter looked with shining eyes at all of them: the men poised at the presses and the setters in their places, the drying lines that now hung slack, but for a score of pages Mentelin had draped. He touched his fingers to his lips and raised his hand and made the sign of Christ’s cross in the air. A little voice said, “Sir, they’re here,” and then each body tensed, unwittingly, in answer to the pounding of a metal fist upon the courtyard door.

Peter turned and saw the master book, the blank and numbered dummy Bible, on his desk, and swooped upon it as he passed and dropped it, kicking it beneath the desk. The yard when he stepped out looked churned and grimy. He made a sign to open up the double-gated portal. The hinges creaked in protest as the doors swung in slowly, followed closely by six men-at-arms who flattened themselves either side of the wide arch. They stood stiffly to attention, three by three, right hands on hilts, eyes straight ahead, heads cowled in leather, waiting. From the shadow came the dainty clop of high-strung hooves. A lone rider entered, thin, erect, black horse high-stepping, rolling its wide eyes. The face of Erlenbach, crusader, knight of the Teutonic order, glimmered faintly in the white light of the crushed new-fallen snow.

“Bring torches,” Peter told the boys, and stood unmoving in the center of the courtyard as Archbishop Dietrich’s fist approached. Speech failed him for a moment: he was torn between a stiff, reflexive urge to kneel and then cold fury at this violation of his threshold. “My lord,” he said at last, unflinching as the booted leg in its bright, razored stirrup drew level with his neck. “You seek a service here in Mainz?”

Free soil, free city, freemen, he intended: he tipped his head both graciously and languidly, to show he felt no deference.

Archbishop Dietrich’s
Hofmeister
looked down on him as if he were a grub. His face was skeletal, mere gristle, long of beak and capped with mail, with tufts of white that sprung from ears and neck.

“Search the place,” he said, his visage hard.

“By what right—,” said Peter, but the knight was swinging down from the saddle with no more attention than he would have spared a cur. The end of his sheath swung around as he dismounted and struck Peter lightly on the arm.

“Treachery. And blasphemy.” A faint twitch lifted the knight’s mouth. He pushed past Peter, tall and slightly stooped, mail faintly jingling beneath his crimson cloak, into the doorway to the workshop where his soldiers had already shouldered through.

The crew looked up, mouths falling open in astonishment, arrayed as if on stage. How they had done this without some direction, each in his own corner, shrinking, freezing, staring with such seeming naturalness, Peter could not say. He planted himself at Erlenbach’s left hand and threw his arm out, with contempt, derision. “What blasphemy, my lord, when as you see, it is your master’s work we are engaged in?”

The proud beak tilted, exactly like a bird’s; with yellow eyes the man looked at him, head turned slightly to the side. “My master’s work,” he sneered, “my eye.” He jerked his chin toward his captain, and the men approached the presses and snatched up the sheets. Keffer put up his hands, and Ruppel followed: ashen-faced they watched as two squat, burly fellows reached into the bed of Keffer’s press and dragged the
forme
out and began to bash the metal with two cudgels they produced from their thick belts.

“Hey!” said Peter, springing, but the knight was swifter, tougher, and restrained him with the biting grip of his left hand.

“It is the book!” The printer writhed in that hard grasp, no longer feigning his own horror. “The book that Dietrich asked for, damn you, man.” He twisted free and lunged toward the soldiers with their pile of printed sheets. “The Psalms, you heathen slugs,” he said, snatching one and spinning, nearly throwing it at Erlenbach. “The canticles of Solomon and Moses, just as you saw them for yourself, two years ago.” His face was inches from that weathered skull: “Don’t think I don’t recall that you were there, with Rosenberg, in Eltville—do not deny you heard Johann Gutenberg offer him this present for the pope.”

The knight looked on him haughtily and smiled. “A pretty story.” Ruthlessly his eyes swept through the open space of the whole workshop. “Every piece of paper, parchment,” he barked, the soldiers fanning out, two to the drying hall, two more to the composing room, the first two giving the poor
forme
a final bash before discovering the twine and with an ugly relish pulling on its end to dump the whole tray with a crash onto the floor. A kind of flare went off in Peter, bright and hot, and he moved bodily to block their access to the room in which the heavy frames of letters waited in their cases, six sets of alphabets, set at an angle to six stools.

“You have no right,” he snarled, “to tear this shop apart.” He hurled the words at Erlenbach. “You order them to stop. This work is worth ten times their stinking hides.” As if in answer to an order he had not yet even thought, Keffer, Neumeister, and Ruppel moved to block the spaces in between the beams. Like hulking statues, hollow-eyed, broad-shouldered, a living mirror of the Kaufhaus frieze.

The boots sheathed in their jagged metal tips made a strange snicking sound. “Oh,” said Erlenbach, as he approached; as if amused, he looked them up and down.

“You think that this is yours.” He smiled, a hideous distortion of those bloodless lips. “From what that tinker Gutenberg said, though, it is his.” His laugh was soundless, a mere scrape; he reached into his belt and drew out a paper, unfolded it, and flung it at him, forcing Peter to bend down and take it from the ground. A waste sheet, from the book of Jeremiah, he saw as he uncreased it. And yet he kept his face entirely blank.

“Nice work,” said Erlenbach, almost pleasantly, “for liars and for blasphemers.”

Harshly Peter laughed. “The pope then is the blasphemer on high.” He shook his head, and sneered, and strode toward the desk with what he hoped was utter confidence. “I take it you have never seen a psalter, or pontifical.” These cretins had a year of Latin, two at most, he thought. He threw the waste sheet down beside the sheets of canticles and psalms.

“Those are not verses.” Erlenbach bored into him with his hunter’s eyes.

“Nor are they prophecy—or blasphemy. An introduction, only, words of preface to the book of prayer, written by the saint Jerome.” Impatiently he flicked his hand. “For God’s sake, ask His Grace, or Rosenberg, if you do not believe me.”

A vein throbbed silently in that rigid, sunken face; the old knight looked around. His eyes fell on the pile of pilgrim mirrors. “Superstitious twaddle,” he said, his lips twisting.

Peter shrugged and gave his coldest, cruelest smile. “Keep the masses happy—isn’t that the way?” The way you bastards rule by crushing, smashing, dulling those who might object with bright new baubles.
Do not the rich oppress you by might?
The words of the apostle James rose up inside, and Peter kept on smiling.

How hateful was their power now, arrayed against the breath of these new men—the stirring of renewal flowing through this workshop, this whole city and their Bible. Has not a poor man the right to heaven? May he too not offer the gift of scripture to his parish, in the hope of speeding his own way? Peter felt his chest swell, heard his voice, implacable and biting.

“You have no business here,” he said. “I bid you leave us now in peace.”

He lifted one hand; a dozen strong men silently arrived from every corner to surround him. Erlenbach looked out at him from his clay mask, and Peter felt himself exult, and then he saw it: sticking out from underneath the desk, three paces from the knight’s shod foot. The master book.

He forced himself to tear away his eyes. But something in his face alerted Erlenbach, who stirred and looked around, sniffing almost, as if he too had sensed that something was amiss.