Gutenberg's Apprentice (38 page)

“I think what rankles me the most,” says Peter softly, “was how the clergy all exploited people’s fear, yet never in their hearts believed in the Crusade.”

“It is a mystery.” The abbot nods. How thirty years can pass and the red tide of Islam lap, while the whole time the One True Church sits on its hands. “So you will understand, perhaps, why I am . . . skeptical . . . that we can do much more than wait, and straighten our own house.” Trithemius lets out a sigh and cites Saint Mark:

        
Watch ye, therefore [for you know not when the lord of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock crowing or in the morning]: Lest coming on a sudden he find you sleeping. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.

“Now.” The abbot straightens and claps. The acolyte arrives with wood and wine. “You say that Gutenberg had known of this indulgence months before.”

“He must have, and as early as the turning of the year.” Saying it aloud only enrages him anew. “He must have made a deal with Dietrich when they hauled him off over that prophecy. That’s why they let him go. He bought them off with what the diocese could skim from that indulgence.”

Trithemius is looking fixedly at Peter, round-eyed as an owl. Quietly he says, “There is another explanation, though.” He tilts his head so slowly, with a look of such assessment, Peter half expects to see him turn his head around.

“You too have printed many letters of indulgence, I assume?”

“I have.”

“So you yourself are quite aware of the . . . accommodations . . . one must sometimes make with power.”

“That wasn’t what he did.”

The abbot purses his pale lips. “Who knows? If he were here . . . but he is not, and it is left to us to scrutinize his motives. He had his reasons, certainly.”

In irritation Peter shakes his head.

“Everyone put pressure on him,” says Trithemius. “Especially your father.”

Peter hears the master’s roar:
What will it take for you to grasp that there is no more gold?

“Sometimes the step that looks wrong in our sight is part of something larger.” Trithemius nods to himself. “As I learned here, three years ago. I did not choose this place—it chose me late one night when I was forced to find a shelter from a snowstorm.” He looks with meaning at the printer. “The ways of the Most High are cloaked in mystery. Not everything is as it seems.”

“You think he had a . . . nobler reason, then?”

Trithemius is softer now, more the confessor than the judge. “I only say our human sight is prone to error.”

To err is human, Peter thinks. He stands and goes to poke the fire. The coals are not as hot as those he banked to melt their metals. But even so his face feels warm. How many errors has he made along the way? He thinks of the mistakes in setting Genesis, of Mentelin’s calm words that helped him see he’d wronged a girl. For thirty years he’s stoked his pain and his resentment of the master, and for what? He mounds the glowing embers and then strikes them into flame, and for the first time feels a flicker of a doubt.

CHAPTER 3

MONDAY BEFORE THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT

        
[61.5 of 65 quires]

        
8 July 1454

T
HE LEADERS of the city council met
ex camera
, in the back room of Mompasilier. The better, Peter later thought, for Jakob to attack the battered tables with his fists and roar and goad the other council leaders into action. The chambers of the Rathaus were too crusted with the Elder wealth of years gone by: thick velour drapes and hammer vaulting, leaded glass that looked out on the Rhine. The back room of the guildhall smelled of woodsmoke and conspiracy and hate.

Molsberg was there, and Kraemer of the grocers’ guild; the lawyer Humery had given up all hope of freeing Mainz from Dietrich’s grip, and with that hope, his seat. While this was taking place, the world went on: the dyers dyed; the livestock lowed; the smiths sent up their sparks. Peter in his ignorance climbed to the ramparts in the early mornings, seeking strength to face the day. He had no notion of the movements in the mighty clockwork that whirred over Mainz, the back-and-forth of brute, uncaring forces. He only learned the hour had struck when one of Jakob’s boys fetched him to Mompasilier.

He ought to know the council’s action, Jakob told him, blue eyes bright. His uncle took a gulp and wiped his beard. The heavy seal on his finger glinted in the daylight, slicing through the dimness of the room. “Enough’s enough. We’ve waited long enough to cut this chain.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “We’ve sent the sheriffs off for Rosenberg to stop him promulgating this indulgence. Even now the thing is done.”

“What thing?” asked Peter.

“Our vicar general has to learn to share.” Jakob’s smile was cruel. “Let’s see now who holds whom for ransom.”

The officers would seize Rosenberg as he was traveling on the archbishop’s business, he said underneath his breath. A cell beneath the Rathaus was prepared.

“Good God.” It was insane. “It’s madness.”

“Madness, no. Lucidity, at last. Force is the only language Dietrich understands.”

“He’ll go mad. It’s an affront.” The protests piled up on his tongue. “Not just to Dietrich but the pope. My God, it’s treason.”

“Treason! Ha! It’s freedom.” Jakob shoved the stein aside and pushed himself up onto his hands. “What’s a free city, otherwise?” He bent, a wild thing, pitched across the table. “What’s freedom, if not casting off the vassal’s noose? To get up off our knees and cry enough! You shall not beggar us for all eternity.”

His face was strange, alight with bloodlust. Horrified, Peter felt himself recoil. “You put us at his mercy, then. Each one of us in this whole city. God only knows what you’ll draw down.”

“We’ve starving farmers plenty with their cudgels, working men with tools gone months without a job. A band enough of angry men, and every manner of sharp weapon.” Peter saw the youths with pikes and axes on the Bleiche.

“This is your plan then—to provoke a war?” His father was still far away. The fastest horse and boat by now had barely reached him with the news of the indulgence. “The walls are rotted, indefensible.” Anna’s face flashed in his mind, and Grede’s, the children’s—the workshop, and their Bible. “You know what happened outside Strassburg.” Six months before, Erlenbach had besieged a nearby fortress town to starve its people out in punishment for insufficient taxes. Strassburg’s merchants, too, had been refused free transit through archdiocesan lands to sell their wares at Lenten Fair.

“For such an insolence in his cathedral city,” Peter hissed, “he’ll hit us even harder.”

“Meet force with force.” Jakob looked at him with scorn. “You always were too soft. Use force, I say; then you can talk.” He spat into the sawdust on the floor. “He ought to pay a portion of each cursed letter to the city. That’s all we ask. We have a right; we’re granting him the privilege of hawking his damned chits inside our walls.”

Peter did not even think of sharing this with Gutenberg. He’d learn it soon enough through his back channels. In Peter’s mind the information snaked like a black thread from Dietrich’s court into the waxy, intermediary ears of toadies in the Tiergarten, the Schreibhaus, friends from youth the master cultivated up at St. Viktor’s. In the event, it took less than a day. “To hell with your damned council,” were the first words from the master’s mouth at noontime the day after. “Those cretins have seized Rosenberg.”

How Peter wanted, then and there, to laugh. Instead he donned a look of shock. “What?” he said, but Gutenberg just growled, “For once when goddamned Fust could be of use.” He thrust his lips out, twisting at his beard. “I’ll have to pry the bugger out myself, the devil take them.” He thrust an arm at Peter. “You’ll come, to keep them straight.” He did not even pause to let him shed his apron. “Move, move!” he said, “we might still save it if we’re quick.”

Peter went as he was ordered. The days were past when he would let the man roll madly, muzzle blasting, out of sight. And yet the city council did not sit on this master’s pleasure, much to his irritation. The Rathaus halls were empty, and the chambers; only Molsberg sat there in his office, leafing through some papers and—as Gutenberg swept in—a second man, a third, both seated, backs toward the burst-open door. His uncle, and another councillor, the master miller Heyt. Surprise, on Jakob’s lean hard face, mutating swiftly into hate.

“Unhand the man,” the master said, advancing.

Molsberg, vast and bald, a pair of glasses on his nose, heaved up behind his desk. He wore the chain of the first
Bürgermeister
, a gleaming mass of gold upon his chest.

“You give no orders here.”

“This council has no right in law to interfere with matters of the archdiocese.”

“Nor do you represent the archbishop, as far as I’m aware.” The trader coolly looked at him through tiny squares of glass. “What is your business here?” Although their clans were bound by marriage, there wasn’t much love lost between them. Molsberg was a pragmatist, a calm, unhurried man, who though an Elder had no wish to quit the city and the woolen trade his ancestors had built.

Rapidly the master moved toward the desk. “My business is to bring you back to reason.”

“Reason!” Jakob shot up from his chair. “The nerve, to show your lying mug in here.”

It was as if the words, and he who spoke them, were mere vapor. Gutenberg did not break stride until he leaned and grasped the edge of Molsberg’s desk.

“His Grace will bring his hammer on you, hard. It’s folly, Reinhart, you must see. The damage still can be contained—if you’ll unloose him.”

“Too late,” said Molsberg.

“You should have thought of that before you brought the vipers in the nest,” came Jakob’s voice. He stood a bit behind and to the side, flashing like a blade—directing all his force toward this Elder who refused even to recognize his presence. “Look at me!” he bellowed, and the master turned, just very slightly, with a curving of his lips, the faintest sneer.

“You took protection from us, let us shield you—and for what? Where is the counterpart, I say? Where is the payoff for a year of silence?” Jakob stepped toward him.

The sigh was great, theatrical; the master glanced at Molsberg and was tempted, Peter knew, to roll his eyes. “The counterpart will come,” was all he said, “when we are done.”

“And Mainz again is pumped and half the proceeds land in your own pocket.” Jakob, bright with fury, took another step, his body thin and hard and flexed. “There will be something in it now, not later,” he said, his low voice thick with menace.

Molsberg was cleanly shaved, his chin the barest line of flesh above the lace that pinched his spreading neck. “Indeed.” His voice was steady. “Why should archbishops benefit, cathedral chapters, every grasping palm the whole way down, and Mainz should not?” He looked with meaning at his kinsman. “We have our interest too. It stands to reason, as you say.”

“This is no way—” the master started. The council president put up his hand.

“There is no other way. He refuses to pay tax, yet we are squeezed and squeezed, each time a little more.” The Elder trader shrugged. His face was utterly impassive. “He’ll take it any way he can, but this time he—and you—have gone too far. We have to take a stand.”

“Then let me speak to Rosenberg, at least,” said Gutenberg. “To try to—soften it, perhaps.”

Molsberg shook his head.

“Perhaps you’d like to join him,” Jakob said cuttingly. Gutenberg looked back, above him, through him, toward the goldsmith’s nephew, standing silent at the door.

“As you wish.” His head swung back; his face was ugly, and his words. “You choose to lie with thugs. That is your choice. The rest is on your head.”

For years afterward, Peter wondered just how word of Gutenberg’s appearance in that chamber got back to the archbishop. The city knew reprisal would be swift, but even so the reason Dietrich chose the course he took was never all that clear.

What had angered the archbishop most? The fact that he didn’t even get a chance to promulgate his new indulgence, before those trumped-up laborers of Mainz had dragged it through the muck? Or fear those curs might get their mitts on his new secret toy—this printing press that now appeared a most efficient means of minting gold?

Whichever it had been, he did not hammer with blunt force—with excommunication, or with troops—as he had done four years before. He struck more surgically, and grabbed the things that had real value in his eyes: the master’s press, still at the Hof zum Gutenberg—and then the master, too, drinking with his peers one evening at the Tiergarten.

How Gutenberg must have been furious—embarrassed too, to look up suddenly and see those soldiers, and then feel the rough cold metal of their gauntlets. Peter could not quite imagine it. He’d not have made a scene, not there: he would have stalked out, haughty, dark eyes glittering with rage. They’d taken him into the Little Court; once more, as if in a recurring nightmare, Peter learned this through a pounding at the workshop door.

Lorenz reached toward him, trembling and bewildered. Peter had to find the master, the old servant said. He had to find a way to make it right. The old press had been taken, piece by piece. Peter looked around him at his cranking presses and those sweating acolytes. Mentelin went past him, bearing a full tray before him like a chalice. Inside a week, the world had been turned upside down. Yet if he went, what was the chance that Peter too were seized, and all of this left undefended? The men were gathering by Mentelin and Hans; he heard them indistinctly muttering.

Only as it fell to pieces did he understand how much that brotherhood had sheltered and sustained him. The shop had been as much a cloister as the workshop of a guild. They had their rites, their prayers that shifted with the seasons. Freeze not, melt not, dry not: ink and metal, vellum and paper, bending to their wills. They had depended on each other, and for years the thing had held. Until first one, and then the next, had snapped the links that bound them. He thought of Thomas and his doubt, of Judas Iscariot. What brotherhood could hold, once faith and trust were lost?