Gutenberg's Apprentice (35 page)

The fasting time had come again: the world was waiting for Crusade. In the markets and the churches, people braced. They put by what little food they could; husbands showed their wives the counting books, the hidey-holes, the keys. The market scribes and private clerks to those of wealth bent to their parchments, scratching out the inventories of their clients’ houses and their souls. Each citizen of Mainz was changed, inside that crumbling wall the city council made a last-ditch effort to repair. They were sinew, bone, and yet determined, fierce. They’d show the Lord that He had punished them in error. When work was done, the younger carpenters and masons honed their battle-axes and their swords and practiced in the marshy fields along the Bleiche.

Fust too hauled out a breastplate that had been his father’s, and his father’s before that. The fit was snug, but not as snug as it would once have been; his air of bonhomie had melted with his excess weight. If once he had deferred—to the archbishop, or the council, or his partner, Gutenberg—now he was grim, his forehead permanently pleated. “Such days as these I never hoped to see,” he’d say, and cross himself, yet at the same time he was strangely sanguine. He had delivered all his hopes, he said, into God’s hands.

Which did not mean he could not use his own. At St. Silvester’s he had learned, on his return from Frankfurt, of the archbishop’s raid. He went to Gutenberg without another word. He had his own key to the Humbrechthof; he’d rented that damned house with his own gold. He did not knock; he just appeared, like some fell warrior. That little escapade was a net loss, he said. Three reams would be repaid, five guilders per. His voice and face were devoid of expression. In Christian fairness he would credit any profit scraped from that disgusting screed.

The master looked in vain at Peter standing there. It was almost amusing, seeing how he turned to him, then looked away, lips working. “Somebody had to dig us out.”

“
You
dug that pit,” said Fust. “Not I.”

“Not you?” His partner with a black look swept the room, perceived that every ear was open and attuned. They cringed a bit, half turned away—and yet the need to know connected them, sharpened their hearing.

“If you don’t pay—” The master dropped his voice so low that only those who stood the closest—Peter, Keffer, Hans—could hear. “I have to scratch around.” His arms were spread, that same old parody of supplication; a sense of injury pinched at his mouth.
I hold this up; what do you do?
his cruciform and bitter body seemed to say. Fust merely snorted. A bolt of anger streaked across the master’s face. “Do not forget,” he hissed, “you’re not the only fountain in this town.”

Fust scowled and ordered them to box the sheets that he was due from the first volume. He’d hired the Austrian to do the painting. Peter nodded, keeping his own face averted from them both. Please God, just four more months, he prayed.

Grede too had changed: she saw portents, omens, in each bird, each bud, each rupture of the earth as it awakened into spring. She walked, head covered, on the Sabbath afternoons, when once she had preferred to stay at home beside the winter hearth or in her summer courtyard. The creatures of the earth would know before man did, she said. She swept her eyes to the horizon, watching for the wheeling flocks that meant that spring had come, and warring time, far eastward of the Rhine.

“When you are gone,” she said, and looked straight into Peter’s eyes, “every last one of you—” She shook her head, reproving; they walked across the boards that spanned the washing stream. He carried a large basket for the cattails and the pussy willows she had come to gather.

“What then?” he asked when she did not go on.

She took a seat on the bench, knocked from a log, that looked back toward the city. Behind them was a thick hedge and the sloping hillock of the Altmünster. She dropped her scarf and closed her eyes, as if to draw some strength from the weak sun, then opened them and stared across the roof tiles. “Men never think,” she softly said, “of all they leave behind.”

He pictured all the women then, the children in descending sizes clutching at their skirts. Imagined in a flash he tried to wipe out of his mind: the market square, a crush of arms and hair, pushed in a panic toward the steps of the cathedral; the screams and blood; the ripping cloth, the pawing, thrusting; glint of daggers and sharp lances.

“They wouldn’t leave the city unprotected.” He tried to ascertain what she held hidden in her eyes. There were small creases at the corners now, like sparrow claws.

“Oh, no?” Her smile was bitter. “There are few enough of you; if there is war, he’ll have you all.”

Despite the Sunday prohibition there were youths across the Bleiche, swinging arms like windmills, bulking up their muscles with huge hammers in their fists.

“But when they do”—her dark eyes narrowed—“you’d better leave us, each of us, protected.”

He didn’t understand. “Whatever I can do.” He reached to pat her hand. Impatiently, she shook it off.

“What’s wrong with men?” Grede looked back at the boys, their grunts and shouts, then at the stream, its bright green bank, its gentle and incessant murmur. “What’s wrong with you, why can’t you feel your hearts?”

He knew then why she’d brought him to that spot. There was no smoke above the dyers’ hut this time, no summer herbs nor bending grasses, dancing feet or laughter. But all around him he could feel the ghost of Anna.

“You are a member of the guild.” Her eyes bored into him. “Yet you would still refuse her all the guild’s protection.”

“I refuse her nothing. She refused me first.”

“And tried and tried to reach you—or do you deny that too?”

“It isn’t your concern now—is it, Grede?”

“Will it be yours when you are dead?” She flushed in anger. “You make us wait, then leave us, then refuse to do your duty when you’re asked. For shame.” She pulled her shawl up to her chin, half turning from him.

“When we most need you,” she half whispered, “none of you are there.”

He saw her once again, her bedclothes red with blood, her mourning weeds of black.

“And I should marry her, just so she has her widow’s tithe and bread?” He almost laughed.

“How hard you are.” She looked at him as if she didn’t know him. “How hard you have become, inside that workshop.” She bit her lip, and shook her head. “I almost think that I don’t know you.”

He did not answer.

“Time was, when you wore all your feelings on your sleeve.” She looked at him with sorrow. “You loved her, don’t deny it. You love her still—you’ve just become too proud.”

Father Michael preached that day, as he preached every Sunday throughout Lent, of mankind’s fall from grace. Of Adam’s punishment for thinking he was not just greater than the creatures of the earth, but almost like to God. Peter heard, but did not heed the priest.
Imago Dei
, he said to himself: the Lord made mankind in His image. Someday there might be men who, with His grace and their own striving, could regain the divine spark that Adam through his greed had lost. How else were they to understand the meaning of this gift—this power given them to incarnate His Gospel?

As Easter neared, the Humbrechthof, released from fear, resounded to the music of the Psalms. By day they set those verses for the Bible, and at night he sketched a letter for the great new volume that the partners planned. A lectern psalter for the Benedictine order, said Gutenberg, lifting one sardonic eyebrow: why don’t we see if we can make the colors print this time. Fust concurred, pleased at this turn, although he held the size of the edition to those abbeys of whose sales they could be certain. Peter worked beside the master once again, fashioning a new technique to print the red and blue initials, using interlocking metal
formes
. But he did not, for all of that, relax his guard. Gutenberg might have moved beyond the Bible, tossing forward his inventive thought; Peter still had three quires from every setter to compose and send to press.

Nick Bechtermünze drew the setting of King David’s songs of praise. He struggled, though, to keep the pages flowing. Peter lent a hand and picked up one of those three quires. The first full psalm he set was number thirty-nine:
With expectation I have waited for the Lord
/
And he was attentive to me
. Inwardly, he smiled.

And then, as if to show just how attentive God might be, they made a beauty of those pages such as even Peter or his father never dreamed.

Each verse of David’s psalms sings praise: thus the first letter of each line is large, and red or blue. They’d have to mimic this in type, leaving a gap for every one to be hand-lettered afterward. Yet there were scores of gaps on every page, too many to fill up with wood. Hans stared a long while into space, scratching his bald pate. He started melting, tapping. The third day, with a tuck and turn, he hauled an answer from the coals. He had cast a plain square shaft the same size as a letter
m
, yet just a fraction shorter than their letters. When slipped between them it would make a gap, because it was too short to take the ink.

Peter proofed the trial page himself, to guarantee the gaps the metal squares made were sufficient. He drew three dozen rounded Lombards, carmine red and azure blue, then held the page up to show to Mentelin and Hans. They marveled. Gutenberg was tickled, too—as much with Hans’s ingenuity as with that startling beauty. The master cackled when he saw those spacing quads, and elbowed the old smith. “Too bad you never had a twin. I could have used you for old Sibyl.” He stuck out his tongue and made a little taunting face at Peter. He’d made a hash of that whole prophecy, and they both knew it. He might have drafted several men, but he had likely set those lines himself—he was just proud and stubborn enough to attempt it. He was no better, though, at setting than at carving; as Hans had said, he couldn’t carve to save his life.

Yet let the man who has not sinned cast the first stone.

As soon as he began to set those psalms, Peter saw that he’d miscalculated in the counting of the lines. The quire he set would come up half a column short; to his frustration, the next quire was already printed off and dried.

“Blind me,” he exclaimed, and slapped his type stick on his thigh.

Mentelin, his green eyes narrowed, leaned to see.

“Short a dozen.” Peter ground his teeth. “Blind me, curse my eyes.”

The gold-scribe counted lines beneath his breath. “Just stretch the whole thing out and short the page before. If God is with you, you can get them to align. No one will see.”

They sat there, pulling at their lips. “In any case,” said Mentelin, and turned on him his easy smile: “To err is human—to forgive, divine.”

“So I have heard.”

“And did you know,” his friend went on, his red head tilted, “that in the Muslim creed they are prohibited from striving for perfection that might rival God’s?” His eyes were calm, his freckled cheeks serene. “Their artists therefore take the greatest care to put an error in each book or painting.”

“What error?” came the master’s voice. He had an otherworldly tuning of his senses to the workshop’s sounds. For all the din, he must have heard the way that Peter slapped his type stick down; he poked his beak into the room.

“The lines are short.” Sourly, Peter shrugged.

“Whose fault is that?” There was no trace in him of anything that might be called remorse; it was appalling.

“Mine,” was all his foreman said, and they locked eyes for just the briefest instant. The master made a face, but he retreated.

Peter watched his back. The man could never say as much—he’d never, ever, admit a mistake. Since Peter crossed him in the square, he’d barely spoken to him, except for things related to the work. Peter had dared to challenge him, to call him to account. And in response, the master cut him off; by this refusal he rebuked him. Admitting nothing, coiled into himself, hard as a chunk of iron ore. Eventually he’d let it go, as he had done a dozen times before. He’d act as if it never even happened. Never alluding afterward to anything, as if the pain, the trust betrayed, did not exist.

To err was human, though.

Peter looked at Mentelin, all copper gentleness and mercy. How hard Peter had now become, his old friend Grede had said.

“And if the error is not by intent?” he asked. “Instead an accident—of pride?” He saw himself, with horror, in the master’s brittle, brutal mirror.

He too had coiled into himself—had been unwilling to admit his error.

Mentelin looked up and smiled. “We all are sinners, Peter. All of us. Me and him and you included.”

He took the lettered sample, rolled it and tied it with a ribbon. How boastful now that psalm did seem:
With expectation I have waited for the Lord
. As if the Lord owed him or anyone a thing. He went out in the fields to find the early lilies of the valley as the ground began to thaw. The earth was there, resurgent, always underneath their feet, a greening present they unwrapped anew each spring. He gathered up the tender waxen bells with care. He walked for hours, mind churning, seeking the right words. At last the best that he could do was this:
My love, can you forgive me?

He would have given anything to see her face when it arrived, to know if he would be allowed to hope. This was his punishment: submitting to the consequence of his own pride. He would not push her for an answer either. A day went by, another day; he could not eat or sleep. He set the letters in their lines; he threw them back; he set another page; he prayed.

On the third day he went to the marketplace, for it was market day. He was as rigid as a statue standing there beneath St. Martin’s eaves. A glimpse, he told himself: a glimpse is all, then I will know. Grede bent above the onions and the leeks; Anna was there behind her: fine small head, a basket at her elbow, swathed in a green shawl. He watched them speaking, Anna gravely, Grede embracing her with two swift pecks on either cheek. Anna nodded, walking briskly toward the chapel where he lurked.

He burned with shame. Would he leap out like some mad, costumed ghoul? Or simply shrink and, when she passed, slink back? He had no right to press her. Yet as she passed she must have sensed his presence; she turned her head, and looked. Her eyes burned fiercely, then her cheeks.