Gutenberg's Apprentice (6 page)

The others laughed at Peter when he washed his hands before the midday meal. They laughed louder when he dried them off and worked some tallow into his chapped skin. Both Hans and Konrad had come from Strassburg with the master and spoke mainly to each other in their strange Alsatian twang. Foreigners, said Keffer, glad to find a friendly face. The journeyman was nimble with his fingers, always drawing with a lump of coal: blank faces with breasts, a nest of thatch. What luscious lips he could show Peter, he’d wink and whisper, if they ever could get sprung. Peter whispered back that you could pay in Paris with silk stockings if you liked. He was no prude, for all the years he’d had to hold his lust in check on monastery stools. Another reason, as if any more were needed, to get free. He couldn’t take his pleasure here the way he had in Paris, unwatched and anonymous. He felt his cock stir at the thought of all those satin entries, the dim red lamps, the damp, inviting archways of the street of Saint-Denis.

Fust stopped by once in mid-October, in between his autumn journeys, to check that things were “well in hand.” Choice words, his son thought darkly: “in hand” was what he was, his very essence. The master barely looked up at his partner, simply waved a splattered arm. “Godspeed on your work,” he let fly. “I’ll take the same for mine.”

It was not God’s speed, no—the very opposite. September and October passed; the daylight hours began to wane. Yet strangely they could feel a force drag the shop forward, silver drop by silver drop. There was a movement there, excruciatingly slow, yet inexorable—though where it led them, none could say.

And then one evening a change came.

The master raised his head, eyes bright, as if he’d caught a scent. He rubbed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes.” The batch they’d made the day before had hardened just as soon as it was poured into the mold. This next batch they completed replicated that result. The letters sliding from the mold were crisp and hard; Konrad had run the first lot twenty times beneath the heavy press, and not a single one looked the worse for wear.

“By God, I think that’s it.” Gutenberg turned to Hans and smacked him on the arm. “You look like hell, you know.” He thrust his chin toward Peter and pointed toward the ladle. “If we can get it right again, at scale, we’ll drink tonight!” He drew his bushy brows together, chanting it like some old alchemist: “Two tin, four lead. Then just a quarter of antimony—to stiffen your sad pricks.” He smiled—a brief, exhausted flash. Hans and Keffer laughed.

Peter went to fetch the requisite amounts. The powdered ores were piled beside each other on a slate that Konrad had erected in a corner by the forge. “Not just a beaker, either,” Gutenberg hollered. “I want a bucket of the stuff.” He fake-punched Hans again. “And put some speed in, will you? I have got a wicked thirst.”

Peter hurried. He scooped and hurried, smelted and hurried. It was this hurry that wrecked everything, he thought as he dashed the sweat away. The pressure of racing to accomplish things without the wit to see if they were any good. He held his two hands steady as he poured and mixed the molten streams, longing for the slow and careful scoring of the pages, the focused trimming of his quill. The time to settle and to think. In half an hour he’d mixed a bucketful and carried it back to the bench. There, he thought, setting it down. The bastard ought to be content.

Gutenberg dipped in the ladle and splashed a test out on the stone. He pried the metal off and put it to his teeth, bit, and spat. “Good Christ,” he croaked, and thrust his tongue out, flecked with grayish crumbs. “What crap is this?” His face contorted as his hand flew out and knocked the basin over. A searing pain tore Peter’s hand; he screamed and flung it wildly to throw off the scalding ore that poured across it. Hans grabbed the flailing silvered glove and swiftly plunged it into the cooling bucket that stood ready by the forge. Peter was jerked along, twisting on his knees, aware of nothing but the ringing pain. The old smith held his whole arm under water, his own hands rapid as they shucked the now-cold metal from the puckered, raging skin.

“Crap,” the master thundered on, as if he had not seen. “Tin, for the love of Christ,” he bellowed. “Not iron, imbecile.”

Peter twisted up to look at him. His whole being burned with hate as much as pain. “Then label them, for God’s sake.” He pulled himself up with a monumental effort, lifting with his right arm the full bucket that contained his throbbing hand. At least it was his left.

“You watch your mouth.” The master plainly did not care that he was hurt. Hans stepped between them and said, “Buzz off, Henne, if you want your metal.” Gutenberg stopped, grumbling; he snorted once and shook his head. If Hans could only bottle that; Peter nearly laughed despite the pain. How did he have the right to call him Henne, and even better, shut his trap? He looked at the old smith with new respect. “That tallow that you have,” growled Hans, and Peter gestured with his free hand toward his things hung on the peg.

He was sent home, hand salved and wrapped in a clean rag. Where they had found it, Peter never knew; most likely Keffer tore it from his shirt. Hans pushed him brusquely toward the door and grunted when he stammered out his thanks. “Serves you damn right. Come down a notch or two now, fancy hands?” As Peter left he saw the pressman, Konrad, coming down the stairs: they’d all be forced into the smelting he had failed to do.

The little chimney clock struck nine as he slipped into the Haus zur Rosau. With stealth he climbed up to his room. His father was away, and he could not bear to speak to Grede. Awkwardly he pulled the tinderbox to him, held it underneath the elbow of his bandaged hand, and struck the flint. The flame was weak; his image flickered in the glass that Grede had hung above the basin. Peter stared a long time at his blackened face. He saw a ghastly, staring beast, eyes white against the grime that caked its skin. He poured an icy stream with his right hand and watched as the dipping of his hand, the wiping of his cheeks, turned the water from clear to black. His eyes were coals now, in that brutal whiteness. Which was he then, a man or beast? This wasn’t even work that in the end brought forth some lovely thing. A brooch, a chalice, or a gleaming monstrance could at least lift a soul above the flames. He might as well have left the farm and gone straight to the Saxon mines.

Peter dried his right hand and pulled the candle toward the parchment he had left upon the table. His Cicero had been returned without a scratch—as if to prove once more his father’s power. The calfskin bore a few dark swirls of pasture life, the residue of loam or blood or sinew. He pinned it with the elbow of his bandaged hand, moving the pumice in a growing circle with his right until the color was more even. He set the stone aside and blew, brushed off the few remaining grains. The sheet was ready now, smooth and unblemished.

He heard the voice of his first real writing master nearly every time he drew the ruling lines. Brother Anselm, at St. Peter’s on the hill in Erfurt:
Your hand is but His tool
. Peter flexed that tool and grasped the ruling bone.
The parchment that we write on is pure conscience, on which all good works are noted.
He struggled, with his damaged hand, to smooth the sheet.
The ruler that we use to draw the lines for writing is God’s will
. He laid his ruler flat and with his bone scored a sharp line, then dipped his quill:
The ink with which we write is pure humility, the desk on which we write the calming of our heart
s.

He breathed, and wrote, and in the writing felt it enter him: the stillness at the center of all things. The stillness and the soaring freedom of the Word. Not only God’s, but all the wisdom He imparted to those willing to receive it. When Peter was but shepherd’s son, he’d dreamed one day he’d be a priest—transfixed as he’d been then by all the beauty and the mystery of trees and fields. At university he took all four lower orders of theology; the Benedictines beseeched him to remain and take his vows.

But he had known—or merely prayed—that God had traced for him some other path. He knew it still, and more acutely, faced with this new devil. The candle guttered in a draft, and Peter paused.
What is your meaning here, O Lord?

Père Lamasse had counseled him not even one full year ago, when Peter confessed that he desired to leave the library at the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. Much as he loved the worship of the monks, he felt a pull toward the swirling, pulsing world outside. The abbot touched his head and said the Lord had portioned out to each his own appointed task. This was the goal of our life’s journey: to listen and to wait, and when it came, to heed the call.

Peter sat there, feeling every heartbeat in the scorched flesh of his hand. God knew he was no priest. And if one thing was clear to him, he was no smith—and never would be.

CHAPTER 3

MAINZ

        
October
–
November 1450

H
IS FATHER RETURNED just before All Soul’s Day. Grede’s bustling—the hanging of the tapestries, the laying of the fires—let the household know that he was due. Peter’s hand was nearly healed. His stepmother had used the age-old remedies of women from the land: a comfrey poultice mixed with feverfew to leach the heat. The scars were hard to see unless you knew to look.

Fust had been gone a month by then. Grede said he might still try to squeeze in one more trip before the snows. He’d managed to evade the bishop’s ban; somehow he’d found a way to buy and sell. Peter did not ask how lucky or how foolish that might be. As he went to find Fust at the customs hall, he had more pressing matters on his mind.

The Kaufhaus had been magic to him once. Many times he had been sent by Fust’s first wife into its lofty, aromatic vault—had woven, senses stunned, among its sacks and bales to fetch the man he’d learned to think of and address as Father. It was a temple too, Fust always said—not to the Lord, but to the trade that made His world go round. Teak and tusks and barrels of Madeira; carded wool and coal; oils and spice and Rhineland wine; nuts and ores and semiprecious stones. How Peter as a boy had breathed in all those swirling scents: of skins and wood sap, tang of sweat and citrus, flavors of the distant lands from whence these goods arrived.

From the knoll outside the Hof zum Gutenberg he could see the cornice lifting up above the blue slate rooftops, surmounted by a lordly frieze of statues hewn from red Mainz sandstone: the seven prince electors—three archbishops and four worldly lords—of the Reich. Their own archbishop, Dietrich, held the center, gazing down on them with massive, sightless eyes.

The more substantial merchants kept their offices up on the gallery that ringed the trading floor. The hall was quiet, just a few high wagons left unhitched inside the portal. Peter threaded past the shrouded stalls and climbed the worn stone stairs toward the office marked “Fust Brothers.” A scribe had lettered it in gold some years before, each word inside a shield that hung from a brown
fustus
, the knotted branch that was the emblem of their house. Peter heard men’s voices, recognized his uncle’s, knocked and pushed the door.

“Peter!” Fust rose, smiling broadly. “You must have second sight. I only just arrived.” Indeed, he was dressed as plainly as a tinker, leggings and dun jacket splashed with mud, a filthy robe tossed on a chair. He’d have tucked whatever coin or weapon he carried right against his skin. Jakob twisted in his seat and raised a hand, a thinner version of his older brother. “Aha,” he said. “The prodigal returns.”

Peter forced a smile. “That was the youngest one of three, I thought.” He reached to shake his hand.

They hadn’t seen each other for an age. Jakob had lost weight: his cheeks were sharp, his slicked-back hair gone silver-gray. Small wonder, since he sat upon the council now. His tunic bore the six-spoked wheel of Mainz, picked out in ruby thread upon his breast, a mark of rank to add to the thick ring he wore as leader of the goldsmiths’ guild on his right hand.

“I was just telling Jakob how relieved I am to be back home.” Fust shook his neck as if to throw off the accumulated weight and reached into a cupboard for the brandy.

“As if home is any respite,” Jakob said. His eyes were blue, like Johann’s, only milkier and paler, winter ice.

“Trouble?” Peter asked.

Fust shrugged. “The usual. Thieves and thugs and spies.” He poured three glasses from a crystal flask. Down on the trading floor, the goods he’d brought were being counted and taxed. Where had he been this time, what had he brought? More knotted balls of linens, lace from Ghent, the products of Parisian looms? If he had headed west, perhaps. Around the turning of the century, his grandfather had dealt in powders of all kinds: saltpeter for the men at arms, metals for the smiths, salts and roots for chemists. Johann in his turn had branched out more widely, adding semiprecious stones and manuscripts and other luxuries; he’d built an empire based on the vanity and envy of the minor nobles east of the Rhine. The German counts and margraves had little to compare with the bright baubles of their cousins on the thrones of Burgundy and Savoy, England, Scotland, and France.

“You should have seen the Neckar surging.” Fust grinned and tossed his liquor back. “We damn near lost the load.” How pleased he seemed.

“Heidelberg, then,” Peter said. He’d never seen the castle of the Dukes of Palatine, perched famously above that river gorge.

“Less risky overland. Though who knows for how long.” Fust frowned, with meaning, toward his brother.

“We’re doing all we can.” Jakob pulled his cloak up tighter. There were negotiations between Mainz and the archbishop—if one could call them that. The situation was the same as it had always been: who could be blamed, and who would pay.

Rebstock and Weinberg had been seized, his uncle told his father. Outside of Höchst, along the road toward Frankfurt. By whose order? Fust asked. The archdiocese. The merchants had got off with just a fine, and nothing worse—if Mainzers had been seized by Frankfurt, they’d still be rotting in its jail.