Authors: Skelton-Matthew
Mainz
Spring 1453
I
awoke from an uneasy slumber.
Peter lay on his back beside me, his hands cupped thoughtfully across his chest.
Sculpted by the moonlight, he resembled one of the figures entombed in the cathedral on the opposite side of the city, a model of calm and repose.
Yet, despite his outward composure, his mind was a hive of activity, busily concocting a plan to get me — and the dragon skin — as far away from Mainz as possible.
We could hear
Fust
prowling like an animal downstairs, riffling through the contents of the chest, which I had opened a short time earlier.
I wondered if he'd found the dormant words written in my blood.
"You don't realize what you've done," grumbled Peter at last, filling the room with a menacing rumble of words like thunder.
I pretended to sleep, but he thumped me in the small of the back.
I turned over and was surprised to find that his eyes were moist with tears.
He was genuinely afraid, but whether for my well-being or his own, I could not tell.
"There'll be no stopping him.
You — the paper, whatever you've done to it — you've ruined everything.
You're not safe."
I looked at him, frightened.
"
Fust
knows," he said.
"He
cant
see the words properly yet, but they're there; he's sure of it.
He says you've done something to prevent the skin from unleashing its potential.
But he'll figure it out soon, believe you me.
And then you'll be in danger.
We all will."
He was silent for a moment, as if considering the awful truth he had to say.
"It's not only the knowledge he's after, but the power.
He wants to be like God and will side with the Devil until he gets there.
Nothing will stand in his way.
Not even me."
I could hear the hurt and disillusionment in his voice and realized that he, too, had been duped.
Fust
had used him.
He had feigned his sudden fit of fever to get Peter out of the room, so that I would creep out of my hiding place and unlock the chest.
He had known that I was there all along and had carefully shown me what to do.
It had been a test and I had walked right into it — like a fool!
"You'll have to leave," said Peter then, using the words I least wanted to hear.
I cringed at the thought.
I didn't want to be orphaned yet again.
Peter could read the helpless appeal in my eyes.
"You have no idea what
Fust
will do," he tried to convince me.
"He'll use other children — not just you — to release the words in the paper... if
that's
what it takes.
Anything to achieve power.
You must go and take the whole damned skin with you!
It's the only solution."
I was trembling now — and not just from cold.
Unable to lie still, I got up and crept over to the dormitory window, which was set high in the wall.
I stood on a stool and gazed out over the peaceful, sleeping city.
Even though spring had arrived, a trace of winter still silvered the tops of the surrounding houses at night.
Roofs sloped towards the cathedral like frosty waves rearing against a cliff.
Mainz, I realized, had always been my home.
I had no desire to leave it.
"The dragon skin can be neither burned nor destroyed," said Peter, musing aloud.
"He's shown us that much already.
So we need to hide it somewhere
Fust
will never go, somewhere he can't follow.
But where?"
I glanced back at Peter, who was staring up at the joists of the ceiling.
He noticed me watching him, shivering in my nightshirt, and in sympathy lifted the covers to allow me close.
I tiptoed back to the bed and huddled next to his warm, protective body.
He had become a brother to me.
"I'll help Herr Gutenberg with the Bible," he promised, pulling the blanket up around my shoulders and rolling on his side, "but you must leave, the sooner the better.
We'll figure out where.
Perhaps after Frankfurt
...
Until then, I'll protect you."
He yawned.
Despite my predicament, he could not keep his eyes open and was soon asleep, leaving me even more worried and desolate than before.
I listened to the sound of his breathing, which rose and fell in steady waves.
Even now, he was drifting into another world, a land of dreams, where I could not follow.
Peter had Christina.
Herr Gutenberg had the press.
Where, I wondered, did this leave me?
To comfort myself, I reached out to make sure that the toolkit was safe beneath the straw mattress, where I had concealed it a short while ago.
A judder passed through me as my fingers once again brushed against the snow-soft sheets of dragon-skin.
I was soothed by a momentary feeling of calm.
What I didn't realize was that the skin was already preparing itself for the long journey ahead.
The paper was slowly stitching itself into the leather cover of my toolkit and another set of dragon's claws was magically coiling round the front edges of the bundle like a lock, guarding its precious secret.
I had opened a book that could not be closed, started a story that had no obvious conclusion.
It was a tale in which I wanted to play no part.
Yet Peter was right:
I had to go.
The only question was... where?
A
The answer came a few days later.
Frankfurt was teeming with people.
Heavy boats lay at anchor in the choppy river, bringing merchants from far abroad, while traders and journeymen thronged the muddy roads leading to the city walls and blocked the gates with their wagons and carts.
Weighed down with bundles of wood and straw, peasants and artisans trudged across the bridge from the surrounding countryside to set up stalls in the cobbled squares.
Oblivious to it all, clergymen and patricians waded through the streets like dainty birds among the common sparrows, showing off their finery.
Peter gazed at them longingly.
"One day, I shall be able to afford a cloak like that," he whispered as a wealthy nobleman strolled past in a bright green robe trimmed with rabbit fur.
Everywhere, people flocked towards the Town Hall — a string of tall gabled buildings in the old quarter, close to the market.
Banners and pennants flapped from the walls and bells clanged in the spires in a joyous celebration, summoning pilgrims to church before letting them loose on the fair.
Downstairs, in the large stone hall, goldsmiths, silversmiths and craftsmen of every description were preparing their booths.
Among the displays of Bohemian glass, Italian oils and Flemish cloth were brooches, rings and
salt cellars
wrought from the finest metals.
The selection was astounding.
I had never seen such riches.
Peter loitered by the drapers' stalls, looking like a smitten lover as he trailed his fingers along the bales of linen, brocade and silk.
A purse of crushed crimson velvet eventually took his fancy — a present for Christina — and he stroked it like an exotic animal before finally parting with the coins to buy it.
It cost nearly everything
he
had
.
"That must prove I love her," he remarked as I strolled past.
I preferred the aromas wafting from the far reaches of the hall and wandered over to the savory corner where bronze-skinned merchants had set up a foreign coastline of fruits and fragrances.
Horns, sacks and pouches full of ginger, saffron, aniseed and almonds lay next to the stickiest dates from northern Africa, which clung to the roof of my mouth as I chewed them.
I had just stuffed a flame-colored powder that ignited a fire in each nostril when Peter tapped me on the shoulder and waved several coins before my eyes.
"Herr Gutenberg says we are to enjoy ourselves," he said with a grin.
"I know how we can spend it."
His eyebrows performed a mischievous jig on his brow and he steered me towards the door.
I glanced back at my Master's stall, which he had erected near a man in a preposterous cockerel-colored outfit, who was selling rolls of leather for binding books.
Beside him, a heavyset man with a warty nose flogged gory prints of martyred saints to pilgrims, who devoured such things in their devotion.
The Bible had been attracting a large amount of interest since the opening of the fair.
Fust
, in fact,
was having
to fend off merchants, all clamoring like pigs at a trough to see the quality of the print.
"Why, this is neater than a scribe's hand," I heard one say.
"I don not need my lenses!"
He waved a pair of pointy bone spectacles in the air as though my Master had performed a minor miracle.
"How do you obtain such results?" asked another, laying his hands on a sample of paper and holding it up to the light streaming in from the narrow windows.
Fust
swatted away his fingers.
"You may admire, but not touch," he hissed.
His eyes caught mine from across the room and I flinched.
All the way from Mainz, he had been breathing down my neck, trying to determine why he could not yet read from the magical paper in his chest.
I was afraid that he would soon discover the pages in my toolkit, which I now carried on my person at all times, and throttle me.
"But the words are written back to front," objected a third, dour-looking man with ashen lips.
He was examining a tray of type I had set up specifically for the exhibit.
"What manner of devilry is this?
The Word of God must not be interfered with in this way!"
I did not get to hear more.
Peter grabbed me by the elbow and tugged me up the stairs.
A
I had to shield my eyes against the pandemonium outside.
Acrobats tumbled and rolled in the square, dentists and quacks extracted teeth and coins from the vulnerable and weak, and vendors called attention to wild and wonderful beasts brought in just for the occasion:
flightless birds with ungainly necks and massive pack animals with enormous ears and hides like wrinkled men.
The air was full of smells and noise, chaos and confusion.
Away from the hall, Peter reverted to a little boy.
He bobbed in and out of the crowds, swiping small rounded loaves from the street-sellers and juggling them in his hands before biting into them hungrily and running away from their catcalls of abuse.
For a while, we amused ourselves by leaping over barrels and coils of rope in the coopers' district — just one of five tiny lanes abutting the main square like the fingers of a hand — and ended up, breathless with exhaustion, outside a house the color of dried ox blood.
It stood on several wooden plinths like a fussy woman trying not to get her skirts dirty.
Nearby was the Plague House, a darkened building marked by iron crosses above the shuttered windows.
We dared each other to stand outside its ominous façade for a count of ten while hopping on one foot to ward off the evil eye of the gorgon carved into the wooden pediment above the door.
A bailiff, however, chased us off, telling us to be more respectful of the dead.
Stonemasons were busy extending the tower of the cathedral in the distance, and we moved closer to investigate.
The city reverberated with the sounds of chisels and hammers, tap-tap-tapping in the air.
The sky snowed chipped stone.
Tall ladders, lashed together with ropes, zigzagged up the side of the building and an intricate system of pulleys and wheels spun in mid-air, hoisting baskets of stone bricks up to the masons, who stood on thin walkways high above the earth to receive them.
Laborers loaded with mortar scurried up and down the ladders like ants.
Just looking at them made me dizzy.
One foot wrong and the whole structure would
come
tumbling down faster than the
I much preferred the safety of the press...
The thought reminded me of
he
dragon skin and the need to get as far away from
Fust
as possible, and I felt the city crumble around me.
It was no good standing still, enjoying myself.
Peter grabbed me by the elbow.
Lured back by the smell of food, we returned to the market.
Spoiled for choice, we each selected a steaming frankfurter from the sausage stands and spent a long time licking the fatty juice from our wrists.
A discordant blast from a trumpeter atop St. Nikolai's Church alerted us to an important arrival by river, and so, still chomping on our sausages, we headed the short distance to the quay, just in time to see a three-
masted
boat from the Low Countries glide like a wicker swan towards the custom tower.