Gutenberg's Apprentice (37 page)

There, wondrously enlarged, were his own letters. He bent to check the sharpness of each edge, the firmness of each angled line. He was, if nothing else, a scribe. He knew each contour as he knew the shape of his own wrist and fingertips. Slowly he scanned the two black columns. No letter could remain that grinding pressure had begun to splay. He searched for telltale signs: the fattened smear of battered letters, ladies turned to swollen-ankled hags. He struck out every sign he deemed unworthy of God’s Word.

And if thine eye scandalize thee
, said Saint Matthew,
pluck it out.

He dropped his pen and raised the sheet up to the window to check the lines impressed on either side, laid back-to-back, entwined like lovers one atop another in the summer light. He rubbed his fingers lightly, felt the sweet, strong bite of deep-pressed type. And yes, Lord, he was proud.

“Perhaps the Book wills its own end,” Mentelin had told him, months ago. Peter bowed his head and crossed himself.
Lord, make it so
.

He stayed that night back at his father’s house in his old upstairs room. He could not sleep among them, as he did from time to time, twisting and turning as they snored. And even so he did not sleep; at four he stood and dressed. The air was warm before the sun had even peeked above the eastern hills. The summer heat was full upon them; he’d have to shift the work now to the night, as they had done the last two years. Silently he came into the workshop, well before the shop boys started stirring. He thought of other mornings long ago, when he had been the one to stoke the forge and sweep the floor. By five the crew would wake and clatter down the stairs.

Noiselessly he padded to the workbench by the great brick oven and sifted through the tools. Hans’s chisels and small pack of awls were nowhere to be seen. The ores were as they ought to be, the paper too. They hadn’t yet begun the casting or the printing then—if they had indeed cut a new small alphabet. In the night he’d tried to tell himself that this was only Heilant’s bitter jibing. There was no proof that Dietrich had not turned, as always, to the scribes: Rosenberg, his vicar, could have ordered half the clerks in the archdiocese. There was a sound like drumbeats as the workers’ feet began to pound the stairs. In the composing room, Peter took his apron from its hook and put on the cotton cap that held the hair out of his eyes. Wearily he bent his head to set his page, part of the letter from Saint James to the twelve tribes.

Hans grunted his hello and took his stick and started setting. Mentelin slid in between them and said cheerfully they’d better work at double time today. Peter stared at him, confused, and then remembered: it was the feast of John the Baptist; he’d given them all half a day. “Right,” he said.

“Though by the looks of it you’re better off in bed—alone,” his friend said, smiling. The three young setters grinned, and Peter forced a smile. Still, it warmed him that someone had noticed. Was this true friendship, then? Of that whole crew, the Strassburg scribe had always understood his calling and his burden. Sidelong, Peter stole a glance at Hans. His scarred brown head was bent, cheeks hollowed as he muttered every word; he did not look to right or left. Once, Peter thought with bitterness, they had been friends.

For three full hours they all sat silent, dropping letters in their sticks. The tower clock struck eight, and Peter read this line: “‘Detract not one another, my brethren. He that detracteth his brother, or he that judgeth his brother, detracteth the law.’” His palms grew slick. He sat a moment, thinking, then abruptly set his stick down. He stood and touched Hans’s back. “If I might have a word.”

Hans blinked and stopped, and followed him out into daylight.

“If there is something you’re not saying”—Peter looked upon his gnarled and weathered face—“I think I have a right to know.”

Hans sighed and scratched his pate, looked everywhere but into his eyes. “I’m not to say.” Discomfort pinched his mouth.

Everything that had joined them seemed to drain away—just like the grains in that old glass that Hans and Konrad used to turn to time their idiotic games.

“It has no bearing on the book.” Hans licked his lips; his mottled irises were ringed a milky blue. “It wouldn’t hurt or hinder, Henne swore.”

The old smith’s look was mournful as a hound. Peter did not answer.
Let every man be swift to hear, but slow to speak and slow to anger
. The words were sitting in his type stick. He turned and walked back in.

All three presses were in motion: strong arms pumping, platens crashing, sheets of paper rising, falling. The pressmen sweated as they grunted, dancing in a fluid pattern as they stepped away to let the beaters ink the
formes
. The pace had punished all of them: Peter saw it in their cheeks and eyes. Each one of them yearned for the Sabbath, not just to praise the Lord. All twelve were broken in now, like leather straps. They longed to put this book behind them—although he knew the next one would be just as big, and harder still.

How far they’d come from those first shaky pulls on the bar. Now even Neumeister had reached consistent speed. When all was humming to the spheres, his crew cranked out twelve hundred pages in a day. There stirred in him a feeling of tremendous love and pride, knifed through with all the bitterness of this betrayal. They were a new, amazing brotherhood: a guild free of all rules. A priesthood, secret and disruptive as the early Christians. Though he was charged to lead them, Peter knew this was a lie. They led themselves—and therein lay the miracle. Each man there was the master of himself. Each had his skill, invented on the fly, his part to play in this great passion. The craftsmen in the shops of Mainz could only dream of working as such independent men.

Or so for months he’d thought. But now he understood the price. They stood alone, exposed, entirely at the mercy of the powers ranged above them. It wasn’t just this book that Gutenberg and Hans had betrayed, but their whole status as free, thinking men—this precious gift that in the working of the Bible they’d been granted.

The bastard kept him dangling until after noon. Every passing hour just reinforced the truth: Peter was the coachman, nothing more—his job to lash the team and scoop the droppings. He let the men go as he’d promised, sending the shop boys to stow the ink in crocks in the dark basement of his father’s house. Each season brought its lesson, he thought, tensing at the slap of that sharp tread. The year before, they had not had that cooling thought.

“I hear the cat is out,” the master said without preamble. So Hans had met him on the stairs. He must have hoped his shamefaced smile conveyed sincerity.

“So it is true.”

“Damned nuisance. But it can’t be helped.” He splayed those pity-me hands and shook his head.

“I guess you waited until your partner was away.”

A sharpness started in the master’s face, spread down his neck, his arms, a molten thing that hardened as it cooled. “You have no notion,” he said, “of the things I have to juggle.”

Nor you, thought Peter acidly. “I know full well how much is left to do.”

Gutenberg strode to the chart, which he had taken from the dining hall and put back near his desk. “You think that you’re the only one who checks?”

His fingers jabbed the columns—Peter’s first, then Hans’s. “Two weeks, three at the most,” he growled. His fingers crooked above the other setters: “Here too, except for this.” His finger hovered over Mentelin’s, whose final quire lurched past the others like a hayrick dangling from a cliff. “Another week for that.”

“Then three more weeks for the resetting,” said Peter grimly.

“Two presses will suffice.” The bastard didn’t even turn to look him in the eye. “I’ll use Keffer’s for the letter.”

“And hand the keys to Erlenbach.” What did he think? That Dietrich’s minions would just trust him, leave him to it, without checking that the order went as planned? The thought of all those toadies in the workshop made him want to retch.

“Don’t speak of what you do not know.”

Peter stared at him. Since Christmas he had lived in fear, expecting any moment that the soldiers would return. But now, with a sick twisting in his gut, he understood. The man had known what he was doing all along—had known since Erlenbach had let him go. He’d traded that indulgence for his freedom. And even so he hadn’t had the decency to tell them—he’d simply let them writhe.

“I need Keffer’s press to proof the psalter,” Peter said stiffly.

The master, irritated, shook his head. “Proof it with soot.”

Only the Book, and all the love that he’d poured into it, restrained his rage. Peter felt the blood pound in his ears and face. That psalter type was his—a thing far finer than this cretin ever made with his own hands. The crowning piece of all he’d learned and done, by God, the measure of his mastery, his
Meisterstück
. He felt his fury flame, consume the love that he’d once felt and leave it in a smoking pile. To think he’d even toyed with showing him what he had tinkered at these recent weeks, the way he’d found to further their technique. He’d burned to take it to him, as he’d always done, the way a cat will drop its catch before its master’s feet. A harder matrix, forged with a new alloy he had found, which he had thought might well work by itself in some device that cast one letter at a time. For Gutenberg was still the only one—save Hans—who had the wit to understand.

Instead the willful Gensfleisch waved his hand. Dismissively he flapped it before reaching in a pocket of his apron.

“
This
is the proof,” he said, and thrust a paper toward Peter. “The real proof—of all my press can do.”

Peter saw the letters—new ones, tiny, smoke proofs of that alphabet that Hans indeed had cut behind his back. Half the size of their black Gothic, a
bastarda
, truly.

“For chancelleries and city councils, letters and decrees.” The look upon the master’s face could only be described as triumph. And in his eyes, thought Peter Schoeffer, the clearest and most naked greed.

“The matrices are struck. I need two men to cast and file.”

Peter looked into those wolflike eyes. “So you don’t care if we are finished by the fair.”

“War is coming.” Pompously, portentously, the master shrugged. “The archbishop needs three thousand by next month. His will be done.”

Peter understood then Gutenberg’s ambition, his design. He meant to use it as a cudgel, turn the press into a weapon made of metal—just like the cannon Mehmet II had wrested from the bowels of the earth.

CHAPTER 2

SPONHEIM ABBEY

        
February 1486

A
LETTER OF INDULGENCE, of itself, is not a loathsome thing. Grede used to buy them, Anna too.

Speaking her name stops Peter for a moment. His lovely little wife. He lost her far too soon, along with their first child. His second wife, Christina, is the mother of his sons. And she too buys indulgences: she puts the shillings in the brass collection box, whenever functionaries of the church alight like crows at the four corners of the market square. She takes each printed form—on which the priest has filled in the blanks with her name and date—and folds it carefully away. All Christians hope to ease the burden of their sins, and pay such fines in counterpart for God’s forgiveness.

“The problem was, he made the thing in secret, for the enemy,” says Peter now, returning to the abbot. “There was no other way to see it but betrayal—not just of me, and of my father, but of the guilds who’d given cover to the workshop.”

The letter issued by the pope that year was of the highest kind: a plenary indulgence granting full remission of all sin. This was no normal letter of indulgence, good for ten days, sometimes thirty. It cleansed the sinner’s soul in perpetuity: there was no limit to it; heaven’s gate stood open. It fetched the highest price and thus was a fat prize for all who had a hand in seeing to its distribution. Few argued with the underlying need, says Peter now: all knew it was a measure of the desperation of the Holy See to raise the funds for the Crusade.

“But naturally the guilds felt burned,” he tells the abbot. “After the master’s promises that Mainz—not the archbishop—would reap the benefit of this new press.”

Trithemius nods thoughtfully. “What was the fee?”

“Two guilders per.”

A flutter parts the abbot’s lips. “Did many citizens of Mainz have that?”

“Precisely what my uncle asked.” One final fleecing of the poor, Jakob had called it. “But still you must imagine,” Peter says, “the terror that the people felt. God’s wrath was kindled and their only hope was to deflect his ire. Repel the Turk! They heard it daily from the pulpits and the hawkers, saw the Elders buying left and right, and tried to do the same.”

The man the pope had charged with the collection in the German lands was one Paulinus Chappe. His territory stretched from Basel to Cologne. “The archbishops of the Rhine, as you recall, refused more tithes to fund the church or, more specifically, the kaiser’s coronation.” So the pope annulled the tithe, ordering instead this vast collect—which anyone who handled got a piece of, from Paulinus to archbishops and then bishops and the heads of the cathedral chapters and the monasteries charged with sending priests and monks to sell the letters in the villages and towns.

“And the producers, too, I guess.” The abbot cocks his head. “The scribes who wrote them—or the printer?”

“Correct.”

The abbot looks long at him, thinking.

“Meanwhile things in Mainz had never been so bad. The river trade was dead, except a little barter with our cloth and wine. The tradesmen barely fed themselves—and yet the church brought all that pressure down to bear. Two guilders—in a good year you might earn it in a month, but not then.” Peter understood now why the council had gone mad. “They squeezed it out of those who least could pay—the whole while knowing less than half of it had any chance of reaching Rome.”

The abbot nods. “’Twas ever thus.”