Gutenberg's Apprentice (9 page)

For several days the talk had turned to wondering about the project that the master had in mind. Gutenberg had gone away for a few days and left them printing under Hans. But that grammar was small fry, Hans averred—a practice run, before whatever better book the master planned.

“Don’t care what it is, just so we’re moving.” Konrad used his knife to shave a curl from the oak table. “I’m sick of waiting on you clods.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Hans said knowingly. “I’d lay good money it is big.”

“Or else a schoolbook he can pop at half a shilling,” Keffer put in.

Konrad nodded. “The main thing is, it should be quick.”

Peter lifted up his head to hear them better, catching as he did a sour look from Hans. “Why don’t you save your breath and ask the scribe,” the old smith scoffed.

As one they looked at Peter.

“As if I had a clue.”

Keffer scratched his yellow beard. “You must have some idea.”

Greek and Roman titles whistled through his head. Aristotle and Aquinas, Virgil, Euclid, sprang to mind. But they were miles away from markets for such learned works.

“Just pray it’s short.” Konrad began paring his nails.

“A psalter, maybe, or a history. Neither is that long.” Peter weighed the buyers up and down the Rhine: mainly nobles, merchants, Elders, and the church.

“Nah.” Hans hoiked a gob of spit into the fire. “I warrant he’s got something bigger on his mind.” He turned back toward the scribe, eyes narrowed. “A sacred work, perhaps.”

“It’s just a guess.”

“You wouldn’t know?”

“I wish I did.”

It struck Peter that Hans must have downed a jarful, by the way his eyes were rolling in their sockets.

“You scribble all damn night. Don’t tell me you don’t know what for.”

“It’s just my practice, to keep my hand.”

“Your precious bloody hand.”

“Now, Hans.” Konrad lifted his, a great big slab of meat, and shook it at the smith.

“‘Now, Hans.’” The old smith spat again; his voice cranked higher. “Don’t Hans me, man.” His eyes were shot with red. “I’m sick of it, I tell you. Pussy here thinks he’s the bloody savior.”

“Cool it.” Keffer reached to grab him, but Hans jerked to his feet, then clutched the table with both hands to keep from falling. “I’m sick of it, I say.” Hans’s voice was thicker, slurring. “Fancy hands has prolly gone already, drawn some pretty new type for the master, little shit.”

“Shut it.” Konrad grabbed Hans by the belt and sat him roughly down, then smacked him smartly on top of his thick skull. When Hans kept cursing, Konrad stood and flung his blade into the wood with a loud
thwock
, the steel inches from the old smith’s hand. Hans flinched and held his tongue.

“Forget it,” Keffer offered. “He’s just drunk.”

Even so, it irked Peter. He crossed the room and loomed above the little leathered man. “It’s just my trade. The craft I learned.”

“Like you had to learn a craft. Pretty little merchant’s boy like you.” Hans tried to hoot but succeeded only at a phlegmy cough.

Peter looked at each of them in turn: Hans bald and slumped, Konrad worrying at his blade, Keffer poking at the fire. The story of his goddamned life—mongrel, bastard, orphan, he had heard them all. Labels, like the tags that designated trades, or ranks, or ores. He scowled and rolled the sleeve up his left arm. The scar from shearing he had borne since he was five snaked from his wrist up to his elbow.

“Peter Schoeffer, born at Gernsheim. Not a Fust. The sheep were kept inside, so you could say, I guess, that I was born in a stable.”

“Now he plays the Christ child,” Hans said snidely. Konrad laughed, though, and something in the room shifted.

“You shut your gob,” Konrad said again to Hans, and pulled his knife out of the table. He smiled and surveyed the full length of that white scar. “That’s mighty nice. It might look better, though—more balanced, if you get my meaning—if I could carve you something matching on the right.”

They got on better after that. Hans never admitted that he’d been out of line, but he thawed bit by bit throughout the Advent-tide. The more the world outside iced over, the more the mood inside the workshop warmed. It helped that Gutenberg had gone away again; it also helped that Hans, for all his bluster, was a man who honored work. He knew that the new apprentice had not once voiced a complaint through all those hellish weeks of smelting.

A few days after Peter bared his forearm, Hans pulled him aside and said that he was sick of pouring molten metal into that damned casting box. He much preferred to smelt and mix the metal, and to leave the blinding part to someone else. He nudged Peter toward the casting table. “Fancy hands make you the man.”

It was a change—and in the absence of a sign from Petrus Heilant, Peter craved change of any kind.

He listened and watched closely as Hans demonstrated how to cast a piece of metal type. First he lifted off the top of the wooden casting box to show a row of trays filled with damp sand. Hans pressed a letter punch into the sand, and then another: first the long ascending stroke, and then a rounded shorter one, to make the hollows for a letter
h
. He did this in each tiny square and then closed the lid, divided into narrow chimneys just above each tray. He took a ladle, dipped it in the pot of molten metal, and poured some into each shaft. When they were full, he waited, counting up to five, and then opened up the box and pulled the hardened letters out. “Still need some filing,” he said, tossing each one on a pile. He handed Peter the two punches. “An idiot could do it,” he said, grinning.

Hans had never cared to know his state of mind or heart and did not seem to do so now. He simply watched, his leathered eyelids half obscuring his keen eyes—then reached, correcting: straightening Peter’s elbow, sliding his hand a fraction farther down the punch. His words were few and focused on the task: “Not so deep.” “Put a little power there.” He taught Peter how to hold the punch at one precise, specific angle, how to ease the top on without disturbing one small grain of sand. He skimmed the skin that formed upon the metal, with a flick of his wrist showed how to pour the molten trickle in.

The chunks of metal with a letter on their tip were no prettier than they had been before, but for the first time Peter understood—in the plain act of molding and of making—that what they did was utterly astonishing. No one before had ever made small letters out of metal: it was the unexpected combination—the marrying of metalwork to writing—that had birthed a thing that no man on God’s green earth had seen before.

The master’s insight had been simple: take a binder’s tool and make a mold. But he had seen that he could never make a punch for every single different letter of the scribal hand. So he had broken each one down into its elemental strokes: the straight descending line, the round form of the
n
, the
o
. Thus armed with a bare score of symbols, they could build each letter of the alphabet by layering each stroke in the damp sand.

It was a Calvary, as Gutenberg had said. But something in the blinding focus of it worked an alchemy in Peter nonetheless. His mind was stilled, the bitter chatter overwhelmed by the necessity of steadying his breath. Each stroke had to be placed at the same precise depth, or else the letters would come out uneven. Each tiny slip required him to start over, smoothing out the sand. He screwed his eyes in concentration, hearing nothing, seeing nothing but the motion of his hands. He shut the box and tipped the ladle—and in so doing, tipped and emptied out the roiling in his soul.

CHAPTER 6

MAINZ

        
Early December 1450

T
HE FACT that Gutenberg could come and go as freely as he did was a clear proof of his high rank. He did not seem to worry that he’d be seized abroad as a debtor citizen of Mainz, as the merchants and guildsmen feared. Fust for his part paid dearly at each junction, his silver greasing countless palms to move his wagons out along the smaller, less-watched roads. If someone knew just where the master went, that someone would be Hans—but Hans, with a swift shake of his head, said only that he’d gone out prospecting. Which book the workshop cranked out next made little difference to Peter. Let Gutenberg and Fust decide; by then he would be off, once more a scribe for hire.

As it happened, the project was decided for them. The second week of Advent Lorenz arrived in haste, his old face pasty white, and thrust a letter at the master. Gutenberg set down the file he held, wiped his hands on his smeared apron, and examined the folded packet, which was heavy with official wax and seals.

“My appointment to His Majesty the King, no doubt,” he cracked and broke it open. They watched him read, the weather moving in swift bands across his face: first clouded mist, then squall, then sudden clearing as he dropped his hand and stared a moment, far away. His eyes met Hans’s. “Rosenberg,” was all he said; the foreman nodded. “I am to dance attendance up at Eltville. Somehow they’ve heard . . . or got their mitts on one of the first copies.” He spun, surveyed the rest of their poor crew; his eyes were knives that moved across each man.

“They”—the archbishop, plainly, and Hermann Rosenberg, his vicar general
in spiritualibus
. The vicar could not have heard from Heilant, surely—nothing Peter divulged could possibly have led to this. Nonetheless his hands were slick as he turned his face away and pressed the thin punch in the sand.

After Gutenberg had gone striding off, intent on making inquiries, the rest of them put down their tools and made a silent circle around Hans.

“What?” He scowled. “It’s not as if he tells me either.”

Even so, Hans did allow that the letter might have come from Gutenberg’s own business with the higher clergy; he’d been to see them more than once. Why, back in Strassburg he was friendly with the bishop, and of course his godfather had been Archbishop Dietrich’s close adviser years ago—though he was dead now, rest his soul. As for the rest, who knew what Rosenberg had seen or heard—you lot had best get back to work.

It took another day before the master’s plan emerged. He would take Peter, though God knew he’d never thought he’d need the cover of a scribe. He wasn’t sure exactly what the vicar general knew—how much or little of his new technique—but they would carry on as if they made what Gutenberg and Fust pretended. Knock out some pilgrim mirrors, he told Konrad and Hans—and as for you, boy, write me out a canticle or two to take to Dietrich in his country castle on the Rhine.

“Which ones?” asked Peter warily, uneasy at this turn.

“Whichever ones would go into a psalter for a pope,” the master snapped.

He must have looked astounded. Gutenberg just shook his head, his tufted eyebrows raised. “You do, I plan.” He cocked his chin at Hans. “I’ll take a printed sheet from the Donatus too, and five new mirrors if you’ve still got those blasted stamps.”

Hans laughed. “Don’t throw away a thing, now do I?” he said, and moved toward some shelves along the back. He reappeared with several dusty objects that on close inspection proved to be dies cast from some hard metal. These were used to stamp out mirrors for the pilgrims: shiny convex badges that, held up from far away, could capture holy rays that emanated from cherished relics like the finger bones of saints or shards of martyrs’ crosses. Or so the credulous believed.

The master scratched his face. They had a day to crank these things out; best not to keep the high and mighty waiting. He grinned as if delighted with himself. What was he playing at? Peter wondered. What did he have in mind, with one small printed sheet, a pilgrim mirror, and a page of written psalms?

His whole life Peter had never seen Archbishop Dietrich from any but the greatest distance. The prince elector was a jewel-encrusted miter at the far end of St. Martin’s nave, a golden blob that led some grand procession. So it was with a certain thrill that he found himself about to float into that august presence on the morning boat to Eltville-on-the-Rhine.

His father had not taken the news lightly. Suspicion pleated his broad face when he discovered that his partner—and his son—would bow and scrape before the archbishop. He bent his head and whispered urgently to Gutenberg, back turned so none could hear. It was not hard for Peter to divine his main concern. Too many people knew about the press—and worse, the very ones who knew were those who considered every man in Mainz their tool. Fust looked at Peter with acerbity and commanded him to be his ears and eyes. His son nodded, wadding up the pleasure that had opened in his heart. How lucky that he bore the name of Schoeffer and not Fust—for Dietrich surely knew the names of those on the city council who opposed him. How lucky, and how right, that Peter should be chosen and not Fust; he’d been a fool to think his father might be proud. For after all, his son would stand where Fust, for all his gold, could never dream of standing: face-to-face with the highest priest in the whole Reich, second only to the king that Dietrich, as last prince elector, chose with his deciding vote.

Peter’s feet had not even grazed the timbers of a boat since his return. The siren of the river whispered as he rose before first light and made his way down to the baths. The winter air was crystalline, though snow had yet to fall. He heard the bells of cloisters on the land, and up above him scudding clouds were sweeping up the stars. Each gate he passed showed a brief flash of dark gray water, teasing him with longing for the ride. He paid the maid who drew the bath a silver penny, twice the normal rate, and told her he’d take comfrey oil to match the greenness of her eyes.

He soaked and thanked the Lord that only crazy fools like him would think to bathe in utter dark. No other soul intruded on his calm, embroidered with the call of doves and the first footfalls in the lanes, until the maiden reappeared and lightly brushed her fingers at his neck. “A silver day,” she said, and Peter stiffened slightly, felt her hands begin to rub the tension from his arms and shoulders. An angel sent down to speed him on his way. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the sweetness of her touch, like fishes nibbling at his limbs. He had to fight not to cry out, as she stroked harder, found and met his hardness in the silken water, moved and moved beneath the waves. The world went white, and it was long before he opened up his eyes. Froth lay upon the cooling water, and the green-eyed maiden was long gone.