Gutenberg's Apprentice (42 page)

“Even if we sell the whole run out, there’s hardly any profit after costs. Assuming that these costs are true, which doubtless they are not. It’s plain to me he plans to pass these costs to me—then cut me out.”

Peter studied the two columns written in the master’s hand. The income Gutenberg had listed at 7,000 guilders, of which 500 had come in—and been spent already—as deposits. The costs he’d listed at 5,000 guilders—which left net proceeds of some 1,500.

“We always knew the costs were huge,” he said.

“Can you not see it?” Fust retrieved the sheet. “Even if we clear that measly profit, I get only half. I owe sixteen hundred on the loans alone, and even more in interest. He’s pumped me, can’t you see it?” He slumped, face bitter, staring at it. “I bear the costs of his mismanagement, and all the risk. If I am even able to break even, it will be a bloody miracle.” His cheeks flamed as he cursed.

“I always said there was no margin.” Jakob was hunched over, frowning. “If I were you, I’d pull the plug.”

It was a boot, a punch, in Peter’s gut. “You pull the plug, you throw away the psalter.”

His father stared at him, his lips compressed.

“It’s true.” Peter stared at him. “You have no faith. No patience, and no faith.” There was a rushing in his head, a roaring. “The ink is barely dry—we haven’t even sold the rest. It all can even out—if you but wait. You haven’t even counted revenue from our own letter, or the psalter.”

“You heard him,” Fust said darkly, “as did I. When he said not to worry, months ago: that I would get my money back.” His ears, his neck, were flushed. “That’s not the deal I signed, you damn well know it. I think he plans to pay me from this pittance, then use his share to pay the first loan back and cut me loose, and keep the workshop.”

“He’d have to cut me loose then, too.”

They looked at one another for a long, long moment.

“I wonder, though,” said Fust, eyes clouding, “if that’s entirely true.”

Peter stood. “You either trust me, or you don’t.”

“Believe me, I would like to.”

“What makes you think that I’d betray you?”

His father sighed. “You cannot see the truth; he’s got you blinded.”

“It’s you who cannot see,” his son answered, reaching for the doorknob.

Fust harshly laughed. “He doesn’t give a damn about the book, you know. You just can’t see the way he uses you.”

Peter turned the knob.

“Why do you think he made you foreman, anyway?” His father’s words came lobbing as he turned. “Not out of any great regard, of that I can assure you. He simply wanted to get hold of you—and then be shot of me.”

R
EVELATION

CHAPTER 1

TUESDAY BEFORE SAINT AUGUSTINE

        
27 August 1454

T
HE JOURNEY STARTED at the water’s edge. Across the river Peter caught bright glints of buckles and clasps, a lifting veil of dust above the waiting convoy. The wares and horses had been shipped across the Rhine to Kastel in the days before. He stepped aboard the ferry taking Mainz’s craftsmen to the farther shore. Fust and his brother were long since across, canvassing the train of wagons.

The guards that Frankfurt paid to see the foreign merchants safely in were local men: brown and muscled fellows scraped up from the Rhineland fields. Soon they would all be soldiers heading for the Bosphorus. But now, eyes flatly scanning the surrounding hills, they stood and waited, fingering their weapons. The convoy shifted, muzzles lifting above axles, creaking as the horses stamped in their impatience to be going. The only color beyond brown of tarps and wagons was bright red. The flags of Frankfurt were tacked here and there to warn the highwaymen away: imperial, the city of the kings, a crown atop a white and outspread eagle. All across the Hessian plain, scores of caravans like this were even now converging on the fair of fairs, the greatest market in the world.

Peter swung up on a small hired mare. The brothers Fust themselves were high atop the leading wagon. Each carried tokens from their women and specific orders to fulfill. The shout went up just after seven; the whole line lurched and started moving. Gutenberg had gone ahead by water with the Bibles snug in barrels, lashed to others filled with Rhine wines and Mosels. In better years Johann Fust would have floated too, but river fares and tolls were doubled in the weeks before and after the Frankfurt fair—just one more small indignity that rubbed the well-worn place of his resentment.

The sounds of jangling and pounding hooves as they moved out eclipsed that nattering inside. Peter felt the power of the compact beast beneath him and breathed the summer smells of baking dirt and sweat. Alone with the blue sky above, the muddy Main a guideline to their right, he gave himself up to the open countryside. The fields to either side were dun or amber or entirely golden; smallholdings stitched their dark green edges to the horizon. He saw the highway winding like a string ahead, up hill, down dale, vanishing at length into the haze. He turned once in the saddle, looking back. The convoy inched like a great serpent as it wound and writhed. It still seemed a miracle to him that they had done it—that they had finished it. The Book of Books was made. The rest was beyond him now, beyond them all, and in God’s hands. He felt his nervousness and fear subside. A feeling of tremendous peace descended. So much now lay ahead: a new day filled with triumph and his own new life, a great new book, with Anna at his side.

All through the blazing day they rode, stopping just to water horses and pay tolls. At Sindlingen the brother of the Count of Nassau took his cut; at Hoechst the minions of Archbishop Dietrich did the same. Passing the courts of law for the archbishopric, Peter felt a sudden spurt of joy. How lucky he had been to have escaped the life of an ecclesiastic scribe! What freedom he now had! He tasted it entirely, the sheer unfettered sweetness of the road.

A cheer went up among them when at last the spire of St. Bartholomew’s scratched its point onto the darkening horizon. The convoy had to stop and wait its turn to squeeze beneath a mighty gate whose torches glittered in the water of the moat below. Once through, the horses pranced and rolled their eyes at a great mass of penned and milling beasts off to the left, and then they were in the whirling din of Frankfurt. Strains of music could be heard, the hum of many thousand men and horses; every light in the city had been lit and threw its honeyed halo toward the green and purple sky. They passed through narrow streets lined by the steep stepped gables of the finer homes, and one by one the wagons split off to the quarters that the guilds had hired. The house the Fusts and the Mainz goldsmiths took for every fair stood just behind the Römerberg, the city’s central square. Where Gutenberg was lodging no one knew.

The Frankfurters flung the whole city open twice a year: there were four hundred houses more or less within the inner wall, each packed to the rafters with guests and goods and traders from the farthest corners of the continent. Doubtless the master stayed among his peers, some Frankfurt Elders, Peter thought as they rode past the mouth of the great square. It hadn’t even started, but already Autumn Fair seemed louder and much larger than the times he’d been there as a boy. He felt excitement seize him as they skirted that great plaza: ablaze with light and sweet with roasting smells, the fulcrum of it all, where kings were made and traders prayed for their salvation twice a year.

Gutenberg had set their stall along the Mainzgasse, the lane assigned to dealers in fine manuscripts. He’d put them in among their competition like sheep among the wolves, thought Peter the next morning when Lorenz led him there. The master had secured a good spot in the arches of a house that faced the street. Thus did Frankfurt’s burghers turn their homes to storefronts: every ground floor now stood open to the passing throngs. The finest wares held pride of place up on the Römerberg: precious metals and armor and jewels and furs. The vast array of other goods fanned out to either side along the streets and alleys, spreading all the way down to the riverfront. Here, just before the wall that girded Frankfurt-on-the-Main, the buyers couldn’t help but pass among the booksellers who offered codices and single leaves and scrolls. Among the scribes and monks were stalls that sold materials to the trade, hides and quills and pigments, oils and papers.

The morning air thrummed densely all around him: the groan of hinges, thunderclap of shutters, thud of mallets prying covers off casks. Peter spread their crimson cloth and reached into the barrel Lorenz rolled toward him. Just one full Bible would be shown, split in two volumes, freshly bound; beside this they would spread a few loose quires. Genesis, and Psalms, the Gospel according to John: which books could better sway a devout heart—and purse? Fust had required them to lock up the copies they had brought for sale at Jakob’s stall beneath the Haus zum Römer. No thief could get within an arm’s length of the gold- and silversmiths, thanks to the sheriffs that the Frankfurt council posted. The master had delivered a first batch of his new printed letters of indulgence for sale as well. They’d floated at his feet and doubtless raised his spirits the whole way from Mainz to Frankfurt.

The man himself came loping as the bell struck half past six, unexpectedly resplendent in the lane. “No one has seen?” His eyes raked nearby vendors setting up their tables, and the rest behind them in the gloom. They hadn’t had the leisure, Peter said.

“Excellent.” The master flashed his wolfish grin. “Though you yourself look much the worse for wear.” He swiped off his cap and squeezed behind the stand. Peter took the velvet lump he thrust at him. Gutenberg wore the same—his only—suit, of dove gray with magenta slits.

“And you, I see”—Peter smiled—“combed your hair.”

The master winked and smoothed the grizzled shock. “My finest hour.” Suddenly it grew much brighter as the drays that blocked the light were banished from the lane. “By God, we’re here!” said Gutenberg, a sudden smile cracking his face before he shrugged off the cloak and rolled up his sleeves.

“You have no fear,” said Peter softly in his ear, “of the archbishop?” His stomach once again was tight with nerves. Gutenberg bent and jogged the quires. “I’ve paid my wages.” He threw a shrewd glance Peter’s way. “But all the same it pays to take precautions. I sent some pages to your cardinal”—he winked—“through our old friend the prior.”

Peter looked at those squared shoulders and raised head—so regal and so proud. “You what?” he whispered.

“Brack’s cousin is Cusanus’s man.” The master spoke so softly Peter had to crane to hear. Gutenberg rocked back and scoured the stand with his uncompromising eye. He turned those eyes on Peter, gold-flecked and shining. “The local priests report to Dietrich, but”—his canines gleamed—“a cardinal or two trump an archbishop.”

Peter sat back on the small, upended barrel. Incredible, the man was just incredible, he thought. He watched him wait; perhaps he prayed. The master’s free hand crept up, plucking as it always did at lips and beard. He looked here at the end as if he too had stepped out of the Pentateuch, his foreman thought: erect and dignified, though battered by his trials. His eyebrows bristled like cockscombs and his cheeks were tanned and taut as vellum. The hair that had been dark when they first met had gone a shade of granite.

Johann Gutenberg stood half in shadow, his chest thrust out, and waited for the world to take some notice. The lane was filling now with friars seeking parchment, painters seeking oils and colors, scribes for pens and reeds, and then their targets: richer merchants down to eye the finished books from Basel or Louvain.

“Twelve hundred pages,” he sang out, “on Turin rag, or finest vellum. The Book of Books, as fine as you will see, and for a fraction of the cost to have it copied.” He rubbed his hands with huge enjoyment as first one, then two, then half a dozen gathered and began to crane.

The looks were always just the same: perplexity, a frown, hands lifting up the hide, the paper sheet, palpation with a fingertip. The questions—startled—as they set it down. “What manner of writing, then, is this?”

“Which instrument has punched this hide?”

“Who wrote these lines?”

The wonder turned to doubt, suspicion in their eyes. Yet Gutenberg appeared to never weary of responding. “It is a new technique,” he’d say, “of making letters.”
Imprimere
, or
impressum
, he began to add, when news of it appeared to spread. By ten o’clock there was a steady stream not just of traders but of clergy from across the empire, habits of all shades and kinds, and then the gawkers and the children and the fools, converging like a tide.

Their fellow dealers hardly noticed them at first, except to whisper and exchange brief looks. The sight of Gutenberg all decked for court and braying seemed to cause them more amusement than alarm. They had their hands full in the first few hours, when sharper buyers tended to swoop in. Lauber’s Alsace workshop did brisk business in their knightly tales; another corner was reserved for routine clerking work, with a long, stolid queue. Peter didn’t see the Brothers of the Common Life, until one member of that scribal confraternity came to see what all the fuss was for. Peter watched him trace a finger over the tiny gullies only scribes would ever think to feel; he saw his eyes involuntarily go wide, then narrow; he knew exactly what the man must feel.

“The page is laid according to the golden section.” The words that Peter said were meant to reassure. The black quill in the man’s cap dipped abruptly. “The edge is like a razor,” he said, the feather wagging like a finger as he frowned and shook his head.

All morning Gutenberg had simply batted off their queries, saying, “It’s a gift from God, just like this earth—and who among you dares to ask Him how He made it?” The secret of the new technique was bound by oath, as ever—if anything, it should be held more secret now. Peter answered the man evasively: “The lines line up remarkably, indeed.”

The scribe peered at him, troubled, and Peter saw a mirror of his own soul. How close he might have come himself to joining that great scribal brotherhood. He thought of Paris and the abbey, and the sacred calling to which he too once felt summoned. But for his father, and for Gutenberg, he would be standing now where this man stood.