Gutenberg's Apprentice (25 page)

“It’s just—I am enslaved,” said Peter, with a smile he hoped was winsome. God knew it was the truth. “And”—he bent as if to share a confidence—“the truth is, it’s the price of his consent for marriage.” He winked and made a filthy gesture with his index in the ring of his left thumb and finger. “I’m wed now to the brothers Fust—but let us pray for not much longer.”

It wasn’t bad, as fabrications went.

Heilant pursed his lips. “I am amazed,” was all he said, again. His eyes were veiled. “You would have given anything to do this, once.”

“Instead I must content myself with an Aquinas or a Virgil.” Peter held up his praying hands. They agreed to a copy of the first part of the
Summa Theologica
. But since the great scholastic was long-winded, Peter would bring back each quire as it was done, and wait for payment. Heilant made a smart remark about his seeming need. “If you but knew,” said Peter, smiling.

It did amuse him in the next few weeks to watch the way his former schoolmate fawned and flattered as he lay in wait for rising stars. One night he breathed that Peter had just missed Konneke, along with Budenweg, Archbishop Dietrich’s private scribe. Peter thought back to that audience, now nearly two full years ago. Was Budenweg the hunched dark figure he had seen, a writing desk upon his lap, at Dietrich’s keep? And then it came to him, a blinding bolt, the thing that he had put out of his mind: a mighty gift, a handsome, ornate sheaf—that proposed present for the pope.

The pontifical they’d shown to Dietrich had not come about, as Gutenberg had prophesied. They’d set and printed a few sheets of those four canticles while proofing their new type, long months ago. But then the missal had consumed them, and the pope had promulgated his new tithe. Dietrich then had not been in a mood for gifts, or missals—they had set the thing aside and concentrated on their Bible. Just one of those extra copies, Peter told himself. He could not sell it openly, of course. But in the secrecy in which the guilds had wrapped them, there was no harm in settling a copy on one of those helpful
Brudermeisters
, who could be counted on to prize the prayers in private.

Peter found the pages easily when he returned, tied on a shelf above the master’s desk. They’d printed off four sets. What beauties they would be, he thought, embellished by his lover’s hand. He hesitated for an instant. These sheets were Gutenberg’s, or Fust’s. “Forgive me, Lord,” he whispered, “as Thou didst forgive my namesake long ago.”

He took one sheaf to show her in their secret pew. When he unrolled the verses, Anna gasped. “Mary mine,” she said. “I’ve never seen . . . its like.” Transfixed, she gazed upon the even blackness of it, ran one finger down the sharpness of the margin. “You are a saint—I am amazed.” She raised her shining eyes to his. “To think these hands”—she twined her fingers round his wrist—“hold this extraordinary gift. To think—they write God’s Word—and will be mine.” She threw her arms around him, raised her lips.

So full of love, and admiration. So sweet, so trusting. Peter felt his face begin to burn. How could he lie? What was their life—what would it be?—if it were founded on a lie? A wave of shame engulfed him. “It was not I.” He let the sheet fall as he peeled her hands away. “I did not write these lines.” Confusedly she looked between his fingers and the page.

“I do not understand,” she said. She was so pure, so true—and he a liar, to her, a liar and a thief. A burning need to purge this fakery consumed him. “I should have told you long ago. But I was bound to silence, and too weak.”

“You’re not a scribe?” she faintly said, and tried to free her hands.

“A scribe, yes—but not only. This kind of writing is much more.” He breathed more freely. “We all were forced to swear a vow. But I can stand the secrecy no longer.”

He tugged her to her feet and led her, almost at a run, outside and down the path along the bishop’s Little Court. Across the marketplace into the Cobblers’ Lane, around and through the back. The lane was empty, just a mangy cat that glared at them, contempt in its gold eyes. He wondered if the beast could sense the knocking of his heart as he unlocked the workshop door. He took her hand and slipped inside.

He tried to see the whole thing with new eyes—her eyes. The shrouded presses, humpbacked widows draped in black; the bricks of metal on the workbench like a shining row of loaves. Beyond these the faint glow of coals kept burning, banked inside the mighty oven made of brick and stone. He led her toward the desk beneath the window where he’d sat and carved the letter punches. That first, totemic scrap of parchment still hung curling from a nail.

“This is my script,” he said, and took it down and pressed it in her hands.

“Your script?” Her fingers trembled as she peered in the poor light. He struck a flint and lit a candle. “Where is your workbench, and your quills?”

“It’s true, I wrote them with a quill—at first.” He raised a finger to her lips, parted now in consternation. “But these, you’ll see, have not been drawn.”

Her eyes flipped back, with dread and fascination, to that solitary line:
In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

“Come,” he said, and drew her into the composing room. He reached into his case, into the majuscules, pulled out a letter
A
. Her mouth fell open as he put it in her hand.

“It is a new, amazing way to write,” he whispered. “Each letter gets a film of ink, and then we press it on a page.”

She stared dumbstruck down at the chunk of metal. “This isn’t writing.”

“A kind of . . . artificial writing. Come.” He led her toward the hulking presses. Beneath the cloth a
forme
lay waiting, bound in its stiff block. “See how we tie them all together, into lines—” He ran a finger on the metal, bent to see which page. “The book of Exodus,” he told her proudly.

Anna stood entirely rigid at his side. When he glanced up, he saw a look of fear, repulsion, in her dark and slanted eyes.

“This isn’t writing,” she repeated. “Nor these books. This is a smithy, do not lie.”

“I do not lie.”

“Not now? When you have lied to me before?”

He reached for her, but she stepped back and put her hands into her cloak.

“I felt the same, when I first saw it,” he said softly—remembering how he prayed to Benedict of Nursia, whom God had charged to write His Word. But Anna was just shaking her small head, a look of horror in her eyes.

He crossed the room and picked up a Donatus. “This was the first book that we made.” He gestured at the press. “And that will be the next.”

She blanched. “You toy with me.”

“I swear it by this scripture.”

“Swear not on something you defile.” She looked wildly around the room, fixed on the little copy of the Bible, broken and dismembered on the master’s desk. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“You do not even try to see,” said Peter fiercely.

“I see enough. I see that you deny the very gifts He gave us.”

Silently he begged her. But she was shaking now.

“
He
did this.” Suddenly she whirled and advanced on him. “He did it, didn’t he? They say he is a hard and angry man.” She fingered the slim grammar Peter still held open, looked an instant at it, pushed the thing away.

“We did it, all of us.”

“Then it is truly some dark evil that has overcome you.” Anna crossed herself. And then she looked at him, her dark eyes narrow and her voice high. “Where are your hands? Your eyes? I thought we shared that touch, at least. Yet now you worship all that’s hard and cold and dark.” She shook her head. “As if the Lord could live inside a hunk of metal.”

“Chalices are metal. And the altar and the figure on the cross.”

“You take yourself for something you are not.”

“It is the path,” he said, “to which I have been called.” His hands dropped to his sides.

“You truly blaspheme then,” she said. “And I would leave this pit.”

He raised a hand toward her, empty of words. His breath, his heart, his very being, seized. There was a dreadful silence. Then in that searing gap he heard, far off, the scraping of a door. A distant sound: it entered him and knocked and became known. The door onto the street, then footsteps, hard and brisk, across the courtyard. Anna’s face went pale. “He’ll have my head,” hissed Peter, throwing the cloth back on the press. He took her roughly by the arm and dragged her toward the windows. When there was no mistaking that sharp tread, he thrust the grammar in her hand and turned to face him.

Gutenberg said nothing for a terrifying moment. He did not need to. His baleful eyes raked both their faces. “Could you not find a barn for fornication?” His voice was hateful. “Jesus, I should chop it off.” He took two steps and thrust his livid head toward Anna’s pale and frightened face. “And you, my girl, if you so much as breathe a word, I’ll have you thrashed.”

She slipped beside and past him, nodding, hurried up the stairs. A flash of her green skirt was all that Peter saw before his arm was gripped as if by death’s own bony hand.

“Give me the key.” His breath was vile. “You are confined from here on out. Thought you were gifted, eh? A special case?” He leered, lips twisted in a grimace. “You’re nothing but a scheming sack of shit. The key, now. Then you get to work.”

What happened next is a white blur. Peter remembers only going to the forge. He sees his hands, carved marble, loading pans of ore into the fire. He pushed them deeply in the flames and thought, as he had not for many months, that it had not been God but Satan who had tempted him and raised him up and thrown him down to die. Injustice twisted in him as he reached his arm in, stirring, leaning in too far. The skin shone and the hairs began to curl. His hopes, too, were no more than flaking, whitened ash. This was not his calling, nor his path. Angrily he pulled the lead cakes from the forge, and in his wretchedness he lashed at them, began to bash his tongs into the cooling metal.

The tongs bit deeply in the molten cakes, leaving clear impressions, deep and sharp as footprints in wet sand.

Peter stared, and stared, and wiped his eyes, and stared some more. He stumbled to the casting bench, groped for a letter punch, a mallet. He held the punch against the still-warm metal, smote it once. It left a deep, sharp hollow of the letter, perfectly reversed. A letter
B
, as in
Beatus
: now a perfect, solid mold. He put his hand upon it, laughed a bit, then wept.

All through that night he worked, cutting squares of metal alloy, some still warm and others in degrees of cooling. He tried them one by one, held fast inside a clamp, testing for the perfect density, resistance to the hammer’s blow. By morning he had made a small, square letter mold of cold, hard metal. A mold entirely crisp and fine, a deep impression that would hold its shape through many castings. He did not know it then, but in his wretchedness he’d found that new technique that would transform their work, which printers everywhere would use forever after. A faster way to cast their letters crisp and clean, repeatedly from metal matrices—no longer prisoners of crumbling clay or sand. It was their doing—Master Gutenberg’s, and Anna’s—though he never told them so.

CHAPTER 10

SPONHEIM ABBEY

        
Winter 1485

T
RITHEMIUS stops Peter there. His voice breaks in, a little squeaky and excited. “You mean to say that it was you? Not Gutenberg? But
you
who made it work—invented this technique the same as it is used today?” He pitches toward Peter, his quill suspended, pointing like a hound.

“Invention is a big word,” Peter says. A stab at immortality, which Gutenberg had never shied from using. His old apprentice nods. “But yes.” His voice is calm. “It’s fair to say I did invent a key part of the process.”

He holds two fingers up to show the size of that small letter mold. “The matrix, which we struck with punches, that’s the name we gave it.”

The abbot’s head is cocked, his forehead creased. “Yet we have not heard any of this until now.”

“I did not shout it from the rooftops.” Peter smiles a private smile. He had preferred to show his mastery in every book he made; he’d kept his distance from the man who claimed it all and trapped him in his shadow. “The world went on, and then he died, and after that I saw no point in making claims.”

The truth had slumbered his whole life, until this abbot in his cloister called. “But as you say, posterity deserves to know.” Peter clears his throat. He gives the facts, as clear as he can make them, so that this chronicler will set it all correctly down.

“First Gutenberg devised the art of casting letters, using sand, then clay. But we had come, as I have said, to something of an impasse. By then we’d spent a fortune—four thousand guilders, I would guess—yet made hardly any progress, before I found that faster way of casting letters. Our Bible printing changed completely after that.”

It was Peter’s hand that held the mallet. He alone who did it, no one else. And yet he sees now how Gutenberg propelled it, too. He was the kind of man who pushed until things gave, a brute who could extract from them more than they ever thought they had.

That matrix redeemed him, certainly. Peter can still hear the way the master crowed. Oh, he was pleased: he praised him loudly at the time, though not again—not at the end, when it truly counted.

“How did it change things?” Trithemius inquires. He seems deflated in some way: he’s gathered back into himself, busy again with ink and quill.

“It was a major step. From this we jumped right to the caster that a man held in his hand.”

Trithemius just gives him a blank look.

“The apparatus we designed to hold the mold, and cast a single letter at a time. This was the main advance that brought the art up to the stage that it is now.”

They evolved it slowly, over time; he perfected it a few years later with the Frenchman, Jenson. The metal mold itself could just as easily have come from Hans, if Peter had not beaten him to it. None of it sprang to life full-blown. Yet what could a young monk know of the beauty of mechanics? How could a layman understand the many tiny, vital steps of true creation? Always they said: it was this man, or that man, this great visionary, that genius. Yet invention is a process, unpredictable and long. All Peter knows for certain is that each of them had been essential in some way.