Gutenberg's Apprentice (7 page)

“That’s why I took the woods.” Fust stroked his chin. “Wrecked the axles, had to pay off half the foresters.” The brothers sucked their teeth and shook their heads—like children, Peter thought, or pawns grabbed up at any point along the board. You seize me; I’ll seize you: it was a pointless game. He waited for Jakob to shut up and leave. But this was not to be.

His uncle turned cool eyes toward him. “I hear you’re smelting after all.”

Peter glanced at Fust, who gave a little nod. “You hear well,” he answered, keeping his voice even. The crew in that hot hell was barred from setting foot outside; they couldn’t even slake their thirst or lust among the taverns or the brothels. But somehow Jakob knew.

“We have a certain . . . dispensation, I suppose you’d call it,” said his father, “with the guild.”

“For now,” said Jakob.

“I’m not much better than a fire-boy.” Peter kept his face toward Jakob. Let Fust hear what he had to say this way.

“It is an honest calling,” his uncle answered.

“That isn’t what I mean.” Their eyes locked; Peter saw that he had never really been forgiven. It was Jakob who had taught him how to smelt and carve—Peter and his own son Jakob the younger, and Keffer, all those half-formed boys who’d been apprenticed at his forge—though since becoming
Brudermeister
Jakob rarely dirtied his own hands. He was the truest son of Mainz, rooted in the Rhineland soil; he would defend her tooth and nail. He’d never understood how anyone could just pick up and go. To him departure was repudiation: he’d seen his nephew leave not once but twice, his own son taking up the stool the foster boy had shunned.

“I told your father, and I will tell you too,” Jakob said. “This . . . ‘workshop’”—his voice curdled—“is outside the rules. The man’s an Elder, and no doubt a snake. I plan to keep the closest eye upon it.”

Peter caught his father’s fleeting irritated look. “Why don’t you let me watch my business,” Fust said, “and you watch yours.”

“The one destroys the other, that’s the point.” Jakob drained his glass and stood. How fitting, Peter thought, that he’d ascended to the post of city treasurer. His first act had been cancellation of the Elders’ interest payments. “They either fund the city like the rest of us and pay their tax, or they can bloody well decamp.” He turned to Peter, one hand on the doorknob. “If I were you, I’d watch my back.”

His footsteps faded on the great stone stair. Fust snorted, slicked his hair back. “He always saw the black before the white.” He gave his son a look. “Though there is money to be made, while they are at each other’s throats.”

Roll in the barrel, he said next; Peter fetched it through the small, arched door.

“Something for you.” Fust grabbed a chisel from the rack. He popped the wooden lid and started drawing out the volumes he’d procured. Tomes of canon law, the decretals of Boniface and Gregory, some copies of the cruder sort of romance. And then a packet wrapped in suede: an unbound group of folded sheets, perhaps three quires. He handed it to Peter, who opened it. A calendar of saints filled the left page, in red and black; the right was blank, awaiting a fine painting. “For Duchess Mechtild,” said his father. A lovely copy of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Peter’s body tightened. The lines of the textura hand were a rich brown, exquisite, written with a seamless grace—almost certainly the work of a Carthusian scribe.
Textura
meant “woven”: the monks had always said the scribe wove his own spirit into God’s.

“What use is this to fire-boys?” Peter’s voice was harsh.

Fust blanched; he genuinely looked surprised. “I thought you might advise me in the painting.”

“As I had thought my life was mine.” Peter pushed the packet back across the desk.

Fust leaned both palms against the wood and stood there looking at him a long while. At last he sat down heavily. “You have not grasped the whole of it.”

“I grasp enough.”

Fust frowned. “You disappoint me, Peter. You, of all people, not to see what this will be.”

“I see a crude and ugly copy of the best that men can do. There’s not a lord alive who’ll touch a book this madman makes, you know it.”

“Not yet.” His father’s nostrils flared. “Not yet—but give it time. You can’t imagine it, perhaps, but I can. Books everywhere, and costing less than manuscripts—in quantities that simply stun the mind. Imagine how the world would look if anyone could buy one!” His eyes fell on the book of hours. “I can’t live just off these. I sell the things, I ought to know.” He raised his eyes to Peter’s own. “In ten years, twenty, who will pay a prince’s fortune for such things? The gentry are not all as rich as that. It’s finished. I am sorry, but it’s true. Once we have found the secret to the letters, there will be no need for scribes.”

“And everything of beauty is destroyed.” Peter rose. “Everything that matters, in the praise of God—or learning—trampled. Do not forget, I know a thing about this business too.”

His father nodded. “Of course. You must defend your interest. Your hands, your trade, I understand. It changes nothing, though. It’s over. The life of scribes, the value in your hands—you may as well accept it now.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Beg all you like.” Fust’s eyes went steely. “It will not change the truth—or your own duty.”

His duty, then. It was his duty to trail Fust, like a hound, beyond St. Martin’s to the square they called the Leichhof, where the painters and the binders had their workshops. Peter’s duty, to feign courtesy at meeting this Klaus Pinzler, to marvel at his altarpieces and his scenes of noble revels painted on wood and glass. His duty, to wait as the fellow scraped and bowed and Peter gave a nod to show his brush would do. His duty and his torture to sit beside the men as they agreed on the contract, and to greet the wife and daughter as they sidled in and grinned. He watched his father ooze that bonhomie that greased the salesman’s path in life, and told himself that he would take the other way. He was Fust’s son, but not his slave. He stood as soon as it was seemly and made his excuses. The family rose as well; the daughter moved to open the low door. He noticed that her fingertips were blue, tipped still with the bright paint of some Madonna. He had a sudden, fleeting urge to wrap his hands around the slender throat; how like a beast a cornered man becomes. The hands he hid inside his cloak were hardened—almost deadened now. He would not stoop to show his father how that master had scarred him. The girl looked after him, pale, almond-eyed, without a trace of interest or pity. The last thing that he saw before he turned were three small blue-tipped fingers, disappearing as she slammed the door.

CHAPTER 4

SPONHEIM ABBEY

        
September 1485

M
Y DOUBTS were more than justified.”

The abbot, busy writing, startles at the printer’s dry, sardonic tone. “What do you mean?” Trithemius lifts his head, and then his nib, his left hand cupped beneath.

“You know yourself,” says Peter Schoeffer, “how little was achieved.”

The world is flooded now with crude words crudely wrought, an overwhelming glut of pages pouring from the scores of presses springing up like mushrooms after rain. Churning out their smut and prophecy, the rantings of the anarchists and antichrists—the scholars of the classics are in uproar at how printing has defiled the book.

“Not all is worthless, surely,” the young monk protests.

Peter turns his face away. “Not all, but much,” he says.

He feared it from the moment he set foot in that foul workshop—that this art hailed as sacred would instead prove a dark art. How glorious it might have been! How tawdry it was now, a vehicle for man’s base lust for fame and greed. The printer watches with a certain pity as the abbot tries to hide his shock. This is not the proud recounting that Trithemius expected.

“You would go back, then, to the days of scribes?” The abbot bends toward him, his face intent. “My monks here copy scripture for six hours a day, when they are not at chapel or at work. I’m still convinced it is the only way to truly learn the sacred texts, and practice pious discipline and self-denial.

“Communion with the Word of God, engraved indelibly on heart and mind—this is what I tell them.” His eyes are wide. “The press, for all its magic, has removed that vital link.”

“Nor did it bring the liberation that it promised.” Peter holds his eyes a moment, and then smiles. “Still, no one has yet found a way to put a genie back into a bottle.”

All these years later, Mainz is more a vassal than before. The products of her presses are all censored and the workers’ rights curtailed. The dream was gone: that with those metal letters they might lift up man from bigotry and want and greed, and raise him page by page toward heaven’s peace and plenty.

“The press is used for lucre now, and that I lay at Gutenberg’s own feet.”

“How so?”

“He was the first to turn the art to commerce. He cheapened it; he would print anything so long as someone paid him.”

“Anything?” The abbot gives him a strange look.

“Pamphlets, screeds, decrees, whatever raised a fee.”

“And you do not?” Trithemius controls his voice, but Peter hears the edge.

“All are corrupted.” He hears himself too then: the weary, jaded voice of one who’d hoped for more. “I no less than all the rest.”

He should have stayed a scribe, he sometimes thinks; at least that way he would not feel this disappointed. He has his printing works, two of his four sons who have followed him as printers; he has made hundreds of fine books. He’s richer, more upstanding, than the master ever was. But part of him still mourns that touch, the feeling of such closeness to the Lord’s creation. At night sometimes, he’ll reach for his old pouch of quills, and stroke the skin of God’s lamb with the feather of His fowl, praying for some sign.

CHAPTER 5

MAINZ

        
November 1450

P
ETER WAS ENSLAVED by duty, and it chafed. If Fust would not release him, he might spend his life in filth and smoke, his spirit shriveling like twigs thrown on the fire. His only hope was to secure a new position that would both set him free and allow his father to save face. He’d thought first that Jakob might help: there wasn’t anyone who loathed the Elders more, and Gutenberg was nothing if not an arrogant, abusive Elder. But then Peter saw himself, cap in hand, groveling before his uncle for some kind of clerkship. Mainz is bankrupt, dunce, Jakob would say. What scraps remain should go to those who pulled their weight. Not that Peter aimed to stay in Mainz; the place was heavy with the venom of that internecine war. For the first time in his life, he thought of purposefully failing—of doing work so foul and torturously slow that Gutenberg would have to cut him loose. He could not bring himself to do it. He had his pride, and pride did have its uses: mixed well with bitterness, it hardened in the backbone. There had to be someone he knew, some former teacher or a fellow who could get him a scribe’s post inside a chancellery, with luck a distant bishop’s or a duke’s.

His suit was buried in a chest beneath the bed: a short dark cloak, a cap pierced by a raven’s plume, a high-collared long white shirt and leggings, and the chamois pouch in which he kept his writing tools. As he unfolded them, he could feel that inky world receding. It seemed a dream, his old Parisian life. Who did she flirt with now, Céline with her russet curls? What did his former fellows say about his sudden disappearance as they gossiped in the morning at their lecterns?

He pulled his old skin on and slipped out after dark one evening from the Haus zur Rosau. The moon was low on the horizon, and the lanes that led to the cathedral were black tunnels, houses clawing toward each other overhead. The market square split open in a sudden pool of light. There was a mist about: November had its foot wedged in the door. Soon it would be the feast day of Saint Martin, the city’s patron saint. What chance was there they’d act the play this year upon the broad cathedral stair? Jakob would scream bloody murder if they tried. The people would not stand for such hypocrisy, he’d rail: the rich man tearing off his cloak and rending it in two to share with some poor lad dressed up to play the beggar.

Peter’s destination was the Schreibhaus at the corner of the painters’ district—the Writing House, belonging to the monks who dwelt outside the city wall at St. Viktor’s. In those days the scriptoria were in full flower all across the empire; in Mainz the finest books were written at the Charterhouse of the Carthusians or at the hilltop monastery of the Augustines of St. Viktor’s. The order’s house inside the wall had served for decades as their city school, and hostel for the lay scribes that they sometimes hired. In recent years he’d heard that it had turned into a meetinghouse for clergy of all kinds, although some scribes still worked in a back room.

He’d never set foot in the place before. It was a fetid den, his uncle said, where Archbishop Dietrich’s priests and abbots schemed—as much despised by guildsmen as the Elders’ tavern at the Tiergarten. The higher-ranking canons of the different orders stopped there when they passed through Mainz, en route from Rome or Aschaffenburg, the Hessian city where Dietrich had his court. Most of them also held high posts in the archbishop’s vast administration or the pope’s, along with parishes they scarcely ever darkened. The Schreibhaus had become a trading hall, except that they no longer bartered manuscripts, wine, and wheat, but pulpits, favors, sinecures, and prebends.

The place was dim and stank of rancid food and wine. For an instant Peter mistook all those shrouded forms for sheep: fat woolen humps of black and brown, all lowing underneath dark rafters. Then the room resolved into the black of Benedictines and Augustinians, the brown of Franciscan friars, here and there a white Cistercian lamb. Off to the right, the priests of the cathedral chapter sat like folded exclamations, sharp and black, a band of white at every throat. Peter walked with purpose toward a half door at the back. A silver heller bought a cup out of a monastery cask. He turned, surveyed the room, and wished that he could stopper up his nose. Otherworldly scents mixed with the sweat wrung from the fabric of those unwashed robes: the chalk of cloisters, the bite of oak gall, the aftertaste of thin communion wine.