Gutenberg's Apprentice (27 page)

Who would now willingly recall the nakedness and sense of violation of that time, the strange, unmoored abandon that it bred? The layer that protected them was stripped away. Peter’s morning walks were filled with beggars and their speechless offspring, bowls held out, eyes hollow, forced like rats into the city from the desolation of the land. Each morning he saw farmers sprawled in their own vomit, dead to God or devil, stinking of the friars’ wine. The churches for their part were never fuller. The faithful rose to gird themselves at the dawn mass, to guarantee an angel at their side throughout the day. Grede, especially, was fearful of the failing of the crops and what it might presage. The news out of the east had come just on the feast day of Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, although her own time was still some months off.

And Gutenberg became a man possessed, as if he’d been hail fellow and well met before. They had to pick it up, get moving. He cursed the sky, the stars, the sun and moon. Lord only knew how long they had. If he knew more than anyone what Dietrich planned, he did not let them know it. He only took that chart on which they tracked their progress and stared at it unblinkingly, as if it were the Turin shroud.

The quires still left to print stretched to the right like empty squares on a chessboard. The rows marched two by two, stacked one above the other: Peter’s work and Hans’s, then underneath this, indented by some months, the quires assigned to Mentelin and the new fellow. “Hopeless,” Gutenberg said, one finger boring on the place they’d reached. Of all those quires, they had not printed even half. He looked at Peter, glittering, but did not see him; Gutenberg looked back, frowning at the lousy chart.

“It is the heat,” said Peter. “Unless you have some magic way to cool the day.”

The master only raised his eyebrows.

It was then that both those partners started viewing the whole workshop as a monster, Peter thinks—lumbering, insatiable, and slow. Devouring all they tossed into its maw, but for all that not moving one iota faster.

His own invention had done wonders for the text. The printed letters were extremely beautiful and dark, their edges crisp and biting evenly. But the metal matrix had not really helped with speed. Nor was it, frankly, as robust as he had hoped: it held for only thirty castings until the plate began to buckle. He’d shown the master one torqued piece a month before, and said they might try strengthening with copper, but Gutenberg had only snarled. “With what?” His eyeballs rolled. “Unless you beg it from your uncle, or your father has a mine up his backside.”

He’d made such remarks before, about how nice it had to be to lay one’s hands on ready gold. Once Fust had come back flush from Paris and handed every man a silver coin. The master had just sneered and said, “And me? And me?”

That late July he tapped his finger on the chart and said, “Another press, another team of setters. Or we’ve no prayer of finishing next year.” As if what any of them did would make a difference, Peter thought. “And even then,” the master went on, scowling: “The hounds of war might be unleashed, and buyers all the scarcer.”

He took a blade and lifted all the empty quires beyond the ten they’d been assigned, and placed them underneath in two new rows. There was no council, no debate, for Fust had left in haste for Basel to assess the damage to his Levant trade. Nor did Peter write to tell him. It was no longer his concern. He did not stand between them anymore; he floated free now, as he’d hoped, though differently. He was a tool, of this there was no doubt. But it was not this master or this father whom he served.

Peter found it telling that the first wares to be lost were regal dyes—the purple of the popes and kings, crushed out of Adriatic snails. Lost too the medicines: the camphor and the ambergris, the vomit of the whale against the plague. Pepper and salt failed next: Who harbored the illusion that their city and their workshop would remain unscathed? Grede spoke of nothing else each week when Peter came to teach his stepsister Tina. The merchants’ wives passed information with the plate that made its way along the pews. The strings of oxen out of Hungary, the convoys filled with oils and olives: none of these set out across the Alps. They said that Ladislaw, the kaiser’s nephew, quaked in Hungary, launching frantic calls for reinforcements. The Turks had overrun Salonika and Athens, and now encircled Budapest. As bad for the merchants was the fact that buyers in the West had taken fright, or like the Duke of Burgundy, diverted what they might have spent on goods to weapons for the coming war.

Speed was of the essence, clearly. Thus it was all the more bizarre when Gutenberg produced his two new hires: a pair of brothers out of Eltville, faces smooth as babies’ rumps, their fingers white and slender as new shoots. If every other member of the crew had brought some knowledge of writing and engraving, the Bechtermünze brothers at the most had held a silver spoon.

“Nikolaus and Heinrich, meet the crew.” Hans looked them up and down and with his teeth made a low sucking sound. “Train up, train up,” the master said and turned. It took no imagination to deduce the truth: he’d got a pretty price to take them off their father’s hands. Old Bechtermünze surely saw the chance as providential. He was a distant clansman of the master’s too—which Elder wasn’t, in those looping ties connecting Mainz’s thirty wealthy clans? He doubtless saw the workshop as a safer cloister than the abbeys where he might have shelved his youngest sons, before the monks began that cant about reform.

Still, presses are not cheap, nor hands, connected as they are to mouths: four more gullets, with the pressman and the beater, wine and bread and now and then some meat. Fust’s face was purple when he learned on his return.

“No warning? Not a blessed word?” He grabbed Peter’s elbow after church. “Is this how I’m repaid?”

“It’s not my works.”

“But mine. And that does make it your concern.”

“I did not feel it was my place,” said Peter.

“Your place is where I put you—there, to keep an eye on things, hold up my side.”

Peter smiled. “I did not know that there were sides.” He stood there, at the portal of the church, a bright late summer’s day. “Do we not pull together?”

“And I buy all the bloody oxen feed,” Fust growled. “Do not forget who buys these tools and pays the bills, and by the way, your wage.”

The next day their two voices rose in counterpoint to Ruppel’s hammer building the new press. In the composing room they eyed their texts, pretending that they didn’t hang on every word. They had the room, the master bellowed: hell, they had the space for working, eating, too.

“Who said that you could make decisions for the two of us?”

“As far as I recall, I am the master of this works.”

“Four more mouths to house and feed.”

“What’s it to you? So long as your own payment stays the same? The trouble is all mine, as far as I can see. To make it work.”

They stepped into the corridor and into view.

“To make it work.” The words, in Fust’s mouth, sounded vulgar. He stopped and raised a finger to his partner’s chest. “No matter how you count it, though, it raises all the costs one-third.”

Sidelong, Peter saw the way they locked their wills: Fust with his belly round and hard, his legs braced far apart, Gutenberg with his beard flowing, pulled to his full height.

“Johann.” The master dropped his voice. “We have to finish this, and soon. You know it’s true.” He took his arm; Fust shook it off. They headed toward the door. “I saw no other way. . . . Besides . . .” They heard the way he tried to smooth that standing fur. “We’re not without resources. We can bring money in as well . . .”

“A charmer, when it suits him.” Hans rolled his old eyes heavenward.

A third pressman was brought in, called Johann Neumeister. Grede’s young cousin Wiegand was appointed as his beater. More boys were hired to fold and damp. And so their number—six compositors, two men each for three presses—swelled to twelve. Peter did not think he was the only one to think of the apostles, preparing Gospels for a fallen world. Only later did he look back on that final shape and ask himself which played the part of Thomas, which of Judas? Which ones were steadfast, which deceitful, which of them began to doubt?

CHAPTER 2

APOTHEOSIS

        
[22 of 65 quires]

        
August 1453

T
HE MASTER SUMMONED Peter the week they started the New Testament. He recalls it quite precisely—can remember clearly the strange sense of portent, the conviction that it all was willed. The prologue to the Four Evangelists had just come off the press, and in it he saw prophecy. He took a clean proof with him when he locked the shop after the night’s long haul, and walked it over to the Hof zum Gutenberg.

“This you must read,” he said, and held out the sheet to Gutenberg.

Jerome’s introductions to each Bible book were oddly frank and often out of tune with what was written in the Scriptures. Here Jerome had moaned a bit, and said he feared reprisals, then justified his duty to revise—and, yes, correct—the Holy Book, in words that clearly foretold their own printed Bible.

“‘Even the testimonies of the evil-sayers agree that what varies cannot be true.’” The master read it out. “‘For if we are to be faithful to the Latin editions, let them answer: to which of them? For there are practically as many editions as there are copies.’

“Excellent,” he said, and gave it back.

“‘What varies cannot be true,’” said Peter, smiling, shaking his dark head. “He knew one day we’d fix the Word, and make it permanent, forever.”

“It is ordained.” Gutenberg half stood and leaned to push the shutters open. A bright new Sabbath streamed into the room.

“Yet still amazing,” Peter said.

“That I will grant.” The master tucked his beard into his shirt. “To think that such as we might figure in His plan.” His grin was crooked. He poured them each a glass. “But then again, it isn’t ours to ask if we are fit for the task.”

“Indeed.”

“Now more than ever we must fall back on our faith.”

For all the foulness of his mouth, he was a God-revering man. He drank from tin and not from silver; he cared little for the fine things of the world. Peter found himself surveying his disorderly front room, struck for the first time by this fact.

“Frau Beildeck would be horrified,” said Gutenberg and smiled.

“She has her work cut out with us.”

The master nodded, but kept his eyes on Peter just a fraction longer than was comfortable. “Slaves lashed to their spars.” He lightly snorted. “Don’t think that I don’t know it. They’ll be just fine—in fact, that’s why I called you here.”

Peter’s nape hairs lifted instantly. Lately he’d enjoyed the master’s high regard—but even so, you never knew just what might issue from that mouth.

Gutenberg leaned toward him, his brown eyes clear and calm and flecked with gold.

“You’ve learned as much as I had hoped. Not just technique—the men respect you, too.”

A rod of fear swiped through him.

“I’ve seen the way you treat them—I daresay better than I do. It seems to me you’re ready as you’ll ever be to run it day to day.”

Peter tried to speak, but found his throat was closed.

“Don’t look like that!” The hoary face was grinning now. “You’ve run it, nearly, these last months. I’ve seen the way you keep the copy moving, how you guide them.” He touched Peter on the arm. “Don’t think I haven’t seen as well the way you watch my every move.”

“No more than you.”

The master laughed and settled back.

“You cannot mean you’re going.”

Gutenberg shook his head no.

“But then—”

“I’ll keep my eye in here and there. Somebody has to go ahead, though—sweep the track.”

The master looked at him and, not unkindly, laughed. “It’s running now with decent speed, correct?” he asked. Peter nodded.

“There’s nothing to it, then. Remember Theophilus. It is a sin to shirk the gifts that God has given.” Gutenberg seemed not to grasp the fear that paralyzed his journeyman, now elevated to the master of the shop. “Come, man. You’re fit to go. God knows I’ve got no patience for the thousand petty problems of the crew.”

That much was true.

“It is—an honor,” Peter managed to get out.

“We’ll see, when we have made it to the finish.”

“Hans–”

“—won’t give a damn. He’s happy in his corner. You’ll be the foreman now: you’ll set the schedule, parcel out the quires.”

“It is an order, then.”

“Indeed.” The master’s eyebrows twitched.

To be so elevated. Raised, anointed—set above his fellows. Peter drew a breath at last. There was a twinge somewhere beneath his skin, the panicked voice of that young boy:
I am not worthy, Lord
. For just an instant doubt and shame consumed him: that a mere shepherd’s son should be so singled out. And then he shook it off.

“I will not let you down.”

“Excellent.”

They bashed their two tin cups.

“The only thing you need is discipline. A hard hand that can drive them.”

He meant to share with him the wisdom of his years. “God drives us, I would say,” responded Peter.

The master smiled, a trifle ruefully. “You keep me honest, Peter, that you do.”

“You do not see my less-than-worthy thoughts.”

“I’ve seen enough.” Gutenberg pitched suddenly toward him. “No women, that’s my only rule.”

Peter did not flinch, although his skin went cold, then hot. “That’s in the past.”

“They’ll suck you dry.” The master nodded, sitting back.

He ought to know. Peter smiled and looked him in his beady eye. “I heard that once there almost was Frau Gutenberg.”

“Deluded wench, to think I’d make a decent husband.” Once more the master snorted. “She sued me, if you can believe it. Breach of marriage pledge. I won, of course.” His look went far away. “People make claims, Peter. They’ll clutch at you, and try to hold you back.”

“No chance of that,” he answered.