Gutenberg's Apprentice (20 page)

Somehow Grede guessed: it was that women’s mystery, their strange alertness to the unseen world. There was a new lightness to his step perhaps, or else she marked his Sunday absences. However she had learned, she bent her wiles to teasing out the secret of which maiden might have caught his eye. He’d scouted out the Elder girls, both she and Fust assumed. No harm there, said his father, just so long as you are sure to quench your ardor at the baths. Take Echenzeller’s Hannah, he would say, or even better, Molsberg’s Judith. Peter laughed, and left them guessing. He was too happy then to gird himself yet for the battle that would surely come.

He never knew just how it was arranged—which guilds were brought into the secret, and what sureties they gave. The only thing he knew for sure was that from then on Gutenberg and Fust paid guild dues to a dozen brotherhoods.

Jakob must have taken some delight in writing out the notice. He might have handled it the way his brother had, with subtlety. But then he would have had to pass up that rich chance to taunt a member of an Elder clan.

They knew the notice had been served by the loud kicks they heard among the stools that lined the drying hall. Gutenberg stalked in among them with a sheet unfolded in his hand, and threw it down among the crucibles and cupels.

“So much for bloody freedom.” He swung his grizzled mane around, a baleful look in his gold eyes. “We’re all inducted now.

“You’re all to scratch out your full name, and year of birth, if you sad bastards even know it.” His eyes on Peter were remote and cold.

Peter laid his punch down and came to sign his name.

The master smelled of beer and smoldering resentment. He licked his lips and bent his head close; his eyes and mouth were foul. “From here on out you keep your tongue inside your head,” he hissed, “or I will nail it there myself.”

CHAPTER 5

SPONHEIM ABBEY

        
Winter 1485

I
T WAS HIS ARROGANCE—his hubris and his arrogance that wrecked it all.” Peter Schoeffer stands and takes a turn about the room.

Trithemius is rubbing at the closed domes of his eyes. “‘Therefore he set over them masters of the works, to afflict them with burdens’.” Wanly he smiles and quotes the book of Exodus.

Peter’s throat is tight. It is surprising—and disturbing, to discover rage still lodged against his ribcage after all this time.

“The man could never bear to share—or to be challenged.” He shakes his head. “He thought of all of it as his, from start to finish.”

“It’s not surprising, considering it was his whole life’s work,” the monk observes.

Peter snorts. “Try working for a man like that. He thought of no one else—he thought of nothing but the glory he deserved.”

It was the way that Gutenberg could open up his heart, then snap it shut that hurt the most, he thinks.

Trithemius is nodding. “How hard is too hard? That is what I often wonder.” He smooths a hand across his close-shaved scalp, a strange expression on his face. “Ruthlessness does serve its purpose.” He adds, after a pause: “My monks hate me, to speak truthfully. But they are lazy, stubborn, gluttonous—they are a blot, I think, on the whole order. One must be hard, sometimes, push far beyond our human weakness to fulfil God’s will.”

Peter turns it over in his mind. He too has been a hard man—a hard master—in his workshop. It’s years now, yet he knows it must be true. He was as jealous as the master to keep safe the secrets of the art. But he never rode roughshod over friend and foe alike, the way the master had.

“How do you know if it’s His will you’re serving—and not simply your own pride?” He sees all three of them in his mind’s eye, each doing his own part. “If we are truly touched by Him, what need is there to shout it from the rooftops?”

Johann Gutenberg felt himself anointed, chosen, just as Peter did. But this was not enough. He had to rub their noses in it, claim it all—make sure that he was seen and praised, acknowledged by the world.

CHAPTER 6

JOHANNESFIRE

        
Feast of John the Baptist (24 June 1452)

O
N MIDSUMMER’S DAY they laid the fire out in a flattened field behind the waters of the Bleiche. The air was too dry to risk the need-fire closer to the houses. The council had considered banning any bonfire altogether, until the livestock handlers howled. There was a need, that year as every year, to purge all sickness from the herds. There could not be relief, for man or beast, without Johannisfeuer.

Who did not feel renewed, indeed, by flames that burned the dross away? The summer bonfires of Peter’s childhood still were close inside his heart. “Higher, higher!” voices always chanted, children crying “Two ells, three!” and leaping and laughing to feel the hellfire licking at their feet and know the harvest would be just as high. Each year he’d watched the women gather the St.-John’s-wort on the bright and shadeless stroke of noon; how he had marveled, as a child, to see them rub those yellow stars that gave off bright red drops of Christ’s own blood.

The master let them put away their tools before the sun had started sinking in the sky. Not out of any kindness, or to free them for the celebration, though. Peter saw him make his way toward the quay and the Frankfurt market boat. Of course—for it was the feast of John the Baptist, the twenty-fourth of June, the day that payments on the Elders’ bonds were made. The only heavy hearts were on the councils of free cities that were forced to pay. Each rich man had his little sack of gold, each workingman a copper heller for his purse, which wife or daughter lined with orchid root to keep the luck from draining out.

Peter told Hans and Ruppel they should find a high spot on the hill to view the spectacle of bonfires burning on each distant slope, each village and each peak along the Rhine. It seemed to him that God above must love that sight, for all its heathen roots: the pinpoints strung along the river like a gleaming rope of fire. By the way that Keffer brushed his yellow beard, they knew that he would court that night—as Peter would himself this year. He’d asked Anna to come watch the fire with him on the hill of the Altmünster. It happened that the year was one in seven, so the pilgrims from the east had come by oxen train and mule to board in Mainz the ships that would carry them to Aachen. They camped outside the cloister walls, and reverenced the relic on its altar, a sweat cloth used by some early Christian martyr. It seemed to Peter quite a fitting place to stand and watch, for goldsmiths, most particularly, were cautioned to keep distance from the solstice flames—and he did count himself, by now, among their number. Their patron saint, Eligius, warned Christians quite expressly to beware the dancing and the chants, the heathen burning of the herbs for luck, as superstition if not worse.

Anna’s mother was a dyer and a weaver; for that reason Anna knew the Bleiche well, and gave him as a meeting point the dyers’ hut. She’d paid a boy to send her note; when it arrived, he tried to open it in private, but Ruppel saw it and sang out.

“Sweets for Saint Peter, eh?” He grinned and wiped his hands upon an inky rag.

“You know a setter does it with great feeling in the fingertips.” Keffer winked.

“I hate to think what pressmen do,” Peter laughed in answer, conjuring some strapping, well-built lass. “Each to his own, I say, and may we all come back half sober.”

He dressed with care in fresh fawn leggings, belted on a blue-green tunic. He did not wish to make himself too fine, yet as he prepared his body for her eyes, he felt that any less would be too little. Smoke was curling from the chimney as he neared the hut; the order had not yet gone out to douse the city’s fires. His heart pressed hard against his ribs, which seemed to spring and open like a lock when he first saw her waiting with a basket on her arm. She took his outstretched hand and put it to her cheek, then gave it back. He asked her what she hoped to gather in her basket, and she looked out from those dark almond eyes and laughed.

“What would you like me to collect?” she asked.

“My fingers, and my toes, my hair, my eyes, my clothes.” He made to peel each thing away in naming it, and cast each part inside her woven bowl.

“Ah, that would never do,” she said. “For I would have you whole.”

She showed him in. He understood that she was showing, too, the women gathered there that all was seemly and correct. Her mother smiled, and straightened from her stirring at the tub. She could not greet him properly; she flapped her blood-red hands. It shocked him, just a little—all those women with their skirts hiked up, above that boiling tub of madder root, their aprons stained as if with gore. They dyed the linen there in shades of coral, brick, and rose, and dried it on the posts along the brook. The boiling room was hot and close, like a confinement, he supposed. They fled at last to cooler air and sweeping vistas from the hill.

There was a little bridge that led them up across the fields and to the wilder bushes just below the Altmünster. Anna would not go beyond the hedges to the holy ground until she’d gathered up the herbs she’d need that evening. He nodded, dumbly, said he’d be her willing slave. Here we can find the comfrey and the elderberry bush, she said. He held her basket as she plucked and did not try to hide how much the watching of her slender, bending body pleased his eyes.

“But you can pick as well,” she said after some time. “Why should the woman do all the work?” He laughed at that, and called her rebel, and she flashed her eyes.

“I think such hands as yours are used to labor.” She took one, turning up his palm. He felt her trace the lines with every tingling fiber. “Such hands, on such a gentleman.” She laughed and shook her head. For they were rough, of course, and shiny with hard wear.

“The wonder is they have not lost their feeling.” He squirmed inside, recalling Keffer’s jest.

“Why should they? When they do the same, with God’s Word, every day?”

He wanted then to kneel before her and bury face and arms and heart. Yet when he raised his eyes he saw upon her face a strange, contorted look. It pierced him, how she seemed, all turned within herself. He did not know then how to read her.

“These hands,” he said, and raised her palm to place it praying to his own, “are simply tools. For gathering or painting, making letters, it is much the same.”

“You know that it’s not so.” She bit her lip and shook her head.

He thought he understood then her reluctance, her shrinking.

“What makes you think this hand is different?” he asked.

“You know as well as I,” she said, and looked severe.

“I do not, truly.”

She shook her dark and shining head; he saw the struggle on her lips. “It has—much finer things in store,” she said at last, her hand still captive in his own.

“And that’s the matter.” Unequivocally, he knew it. “That’s why you turn and look away. Because of who my father is?”

She took an elderberry from her basket, crushing it between her fingers. Pale green juice ran down her skin. “I am a painter’s daughter. You, a
clericus
.” She looked him gravely in the face. “I do not think your father has a bride like me in mind.”

“My father’s dead these fifteen years.”

But she was not convinced.

He told her then that Johann Fust could not refuse. How could he possibly, when he himself had chosen Grede? A craftsman’s daughter, and a binder, with strong hands like hers, though not so elegant and fine.

“You do not jest?” She cocked her head, a little ember glowing in her eyes.

He laced her arms around his neck and laid his forehead down to hers. “Here in the sight of God, I swear to you. No other woman holds the keys to this poor kingdom.”

In the shimmer in her eyes he saw as much of heaven as a man can pray for in this life, the darkness stirring with a flame that burned him to her, soldered him forever to her frame. They pressed together, scorched, their eagerness and hunger naked as the white curve of her neck. Only with the greatest effort did they step apart and, bodies bursting, gasp the sweetness of the evening. Never had he felt such torment, yet such peace.

“Shhh,” she said, as he began to speak. She put a finger to his lips, and he could not prevent himself from seizing it, and sucking it, and pulling her back to his hips. She groaned, and they were only saved by a great sound, of men and women cheering, and the thud of ax on wood.

“God help me,” he said hoarsely. “I am but a beast.”

“No beast, but Adam’s flesh.” She kissed him, chastely, and began to straighten up her hair.

He wove her a garland of St.-John’s-wort, for even Peter knew that it was used for strength on a long journey. They embarked that night for somewhere neither one had been before. She took it from his hands and said to add more blossoms, so he did, and then she placed it on her waist and let him fix it there, with kisses up her dress and to the open swelling of her breasts. She reminded him of the tradition as she led him toward the fire. The solstice belt of mugwort is a charm against all sickness, for the leaching of all evil: a pledge they tossed into the fire to guarantee their health. “They even say”—she smiled—“that if you hang one in your house, it wards off looks from evil men.”

“Then hang a dozen, when this night is done,” he said as they stepped into the mass of dark and dancing bodies in the bonfire’s glow. He saw her parents there, her brothers, painters, tanners, weavers, bakers, coopers, saddlers: men and women lined and hard from scraping, beating, shaping, forming. Hans, too, Ruppel, Keffer, those last two with girls, drawn like himself to that communion with their fellows. He thought he saw his uncle, then his cousin, in the flashing of the fire; he saw them, then he lost them in the dance, which wove and leapt around with screams and shouts—and all that while, as he could hear the reeds and flutes beneath his skin, as if the music rose from his own soul, he thought not of God or devil but of Anna, only Anna, with her fire-kissed skin all flushed with love. He knew himself at last to be a child of earth and heaven, body fused to spirit in the sight of God and man, when as the solstice flames died down they looked at one another and agreed, without a word, and ran, and sprang across the embers and came down in one another’s arms.
If this be sin
, he thought, and tore the belt from round her waist and cast it in the flames and heard the crowd roar praise. They stood there, panting, joined before the world.