The torments that God poured upon his faithful servant preyed on Peter’s mind. Job’s suffering and isolation were extraordinary, epic—yet they struck a chord in his own soul. Over and over the phrase recurred to him like an old song—what Job’s poor servant said, returning with each tale of woe: “And I alone have escaped to tell thee.”
CHAPTER 6
APPARITIONS
[37.5 quires of 65]
December 1453
THE BOOKS OF PROPHECY began appearing one by one, like random snowflakes through the Adventide. None paid them any notice at the start. Books usually appeared this way, a copy here, a copy there—until the copies started clustering, drifting into noticeable little piles.
The first to wonder in his father’s hearing were the traders on the Kaufhaus floor. The wives of Salman and Kumoff had each bought a pamphlet from an urchin near St. Martin’s. This in itself might have passed unremarked. But what was strange was how alike they were, said Kumoff—like peas in pods—and more than that, the boy had more, and there were others, they had heard, for sale inside the Schreibhaus.
“I told him scribes were just as hard up now as anybody else,” Fust said. Peter reached to take the copy that his father held.
“How many, at what price?” he asked.
“Five shillings each. God knows how many, though. A score? A hundred? More?”
The prophecy made fourteen pages. If Gutenberg had scared up a whole ream of paper, he could make several hundred, Peter reckoned, using Keffer and Ruppel, pulled after hours to do the work back at the Hof zum Gutenberg. He hadn’t had the heart to block them when the men had begged to earn the little extra that the master offered.
“He’d better watch how many he puts out,” Fust said, chewing his lip.
Yet he’d not easily resist temptation—not if he thought that he could dredge up twenty, thirty guilders. “He might have shown us,” Peter said, and opened the slim poem.
“He didn’t dare.”
Small wonder: the thing was nasty and cheap, type badly inked and letters lurching on their feet. Whoever set it had not even tried to justify the lines. He’d used their first poor type, in its last gasp, not for a Latin schoolbook, but auf Deutsch: the v’s stood in for all those w’s no Latin book required.
“A waste of rag.”
“Apparently they’re selling.”
Peter tossed it on the desk. “He’ll draw attention to us, far too soon.”
Feet drumming on the stairs stopped up their mouths; there was a sharp knock at the door. As Fust was saying, “Enter,” Jakob’s head appeared. His eyes went right to Peter. “Well, well,” he said, stepping inside. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“And you,” said Peter, rising and reaching out a hand. “You’re looking well.”
“More than I might say of you.” Jakob embraced him, then stepped back, searching his nephew with his eyes. “You work him to the death, Johann. He’s skin and bones.”
“No worse or better than the rest of us.” His brother gestured to a chair.
They all were thinner, harder, Peter thought: not only in the workshop but in all of Mainz, thanks to the sultan and his war.
Jakob did not take the chair. His eyes remained on Peter’s face; his hand slipped to a pouch beneath his cloak. “This better not be why.” He drew a pamphlet out and threw it on the desk, his nostrils flaring when he saw its doppelgänger.
“That’s not the reason the guilds shelter you.” He looked at Fust. “A year.” His face was hard. “A whole damned year we hold our tongues—for this? I give my word that it will help us, I protect that thieving goat, and this is what I get? Some drivel from a witch?”
Fust wiped one hand across his face. “Sit,” he said again. His voice was weary.
Bull-like, Jakob swung his head. “Who made it? You?”
“Gutenberg,” said Johann Fust. “Though I did warn him.”
“Not at the Humbrechthof,” said Peter, swiftly.
“I don’t care where.” Jakob’s eyes were like the Alpen ice. “I owe him nothing—nothing, do you understand? I always said he’d double-cross you, take what he could get and screw us all. I hope to hell you see it now.” He ground the words.
“Six months.” Peter leaned urgently toward him. “Just six more months, that’s all I need. Then we can free the press, and Mainz will get what it is owed.”
Hate distorted Jakob’s sunken cheeks. “‘What Mainz is owed.’” He sneered. “A pretty promise, presses that can spit out gold. When will we get them, eh? When Erlenbach has dragged them off to Eltville, I suppose?” He brought his fist down on the desk. “God damn you and your promises, Johann.”
“I gave my word.” Fust’s voice was cold. “I do not break it, Jakob.”
“And yet you let him lead you by the nose.”
Fust said nothing; there was nothing he could say. He faced his brother, the sinews rigid in his neck.
“We can’t protect you—won’t protect you, if he acts against your interest, and our own.”
They stood there silent for a moment, until Jakob sighed. He pulled his cloak taut and wound it around him like a shroud—at last he sat.
“They’ll read it as a call for Crusade,” he said, shaking his head. “You know as well as I that is the last thing Dietrich wants.” His eyes were sunken, glowing in the shadow of his hood.
“His hounds are here,” he said, eyes swiveling to Peter. “His spies, too, everywhere.” His smile was bitter. “The eyes of the archdiocese are trained on Mainz. God only knows what he has promised all his priests to get this tax.”
“So it is done.” Fust sat back heavily.
“And now you lay this in his grasp. There will be nothing, then—no way to restrain that dead hand.”
Der Tote Hand, they called that silent, brutal grasp: the dead hand of the church, exempt from tax on all the property it owned—and yet implacable, invisible, exacting tribute from those under its control. Reaching, always reaching, for some way to suck out their life force.
“You’d better get these on a boat upriver,” said his uncle, “if you hope to hawk them.”
Peter restrained a sudden urge to bolt and scour the city, gathering the traces of this folly. “The ship I run”—he smiled—“is tight, in any case. Secure and battened.” An ark as tough and supple as any cedars out of Lebanon. Levelly he looked at Jakob. “As for the other . . . who can say?” He shrugged.
Jakob nodded. He looked at Fust. “I’ll do what I can—for you, but no one else.”
Peter went directly toward St. Martin’s. The day was bright and very cold. Puffs of breath hung in the air; beggars huddled, wound in tatters, on the red cathedral stairs. He scanned their sacking, bodies, bowls, and saw a thin boy at the corner by the archbishop’s private chapel, quite clearly freezing, clutching with one paw at a cloak beneath his chin. His other held a sheaf aloft as he called hoarsely, “Comes the Peace-King! To redeem us and destroy the infidel!”
He was grubby, wiry. God only knew where Gutenberg had found him.
“I’ll have one,” Peter muttered, digging in his pocket for the coins. “How many have you, then?” His eyes went to a satchel at the urchin’s feet. The boy just put a hand up to his swaddled ear and shook his head, as if he were stone deaf, and kept on shouting.
Peter turned and started moving quickly at an angle past the Mint, back up and out toward the Cobblers’ Lane. He almost ran into the short man in his path, so deep was he in his dark thoughts. He swerved, and looked up into the ruddy face of Petrus Heilant.
“Rushing, always rushing.” Heilant raised a sandy eyebrow. He was covered in a warm gray cloak with bright red piping. “One might think you had some vital errand.”
“Business waits for no man,” Peter said.
“But surely it must wait for God?” Heilant’s cheeks were pink with cold; he wore the close-fitted crimson cap of the cathedral chapter. Plainly he was simple scribe no more.
“I pray to Him along
the way.” Still Peter stopped and held his hand out.
“We see too little of you, though.” Heilant’s eyes were veiled, ironic. “I’d almost think you kept your distance.”
Peter faked a smile. “It looks as if you are the one who’s left me in the dust.”
Heilant brightened and touched his cap. “It suits me, don’t you think?”
As well as it ever suited any lustful soul. Peter rolled his eyes and kept his smile on. So Heilant had managed, after all, to creep his way into some well-paid post. One not too high, nor yet abject; he had, like Peter, studied the four lower orders of theology.
“Let me guess.” Playfully, he poked him. “Not akolyte or ostiar.” Petrus Heilant would not stoop to altar service, or to ringing of the bells.
“Lektorat.” Heilant’s voice was clipped.
“Bravo. Of course.” Peter clapped him on the back. The only other option would have been as exorzist: far better to read out the lessons than to have to lay one’s hands upon some dread-filled soul.
His former schoolmate’s eyes roved over him, taking in his threadbare cloak, his ink-stained hands, then froze. He seemed to coil himself up as his hand jabbed toward the pamphlet clutched at Peter’s side. “So you have seen it too,” he breathed. His face was guarded suddenly: if Peter had not known him better, he’d have said that he was scared.
The printer measured out each word. “I only just now bought it. Why?”
Heilant bent his head close. “It’s more than strange.” His breath was hot in Peter’s ear. “Something queer—ungodly. I’ve seen three now and”—he was hissing—“every one is just exactly, I mean exactly—not an altered letter, not an eyeskip—utterly the same.”
He stood rooted, clutching Peter’s arm. The look upon his face was clearly fear. It was a look that Peter knew: he’d seen it too on Anna Pinzler’s face. If years ago he’d not been told how they were made—and at the very instant that his hand first grazed those printed lines—he would have looked as frightened and amazed.
The scribe’s blue eyes were latched on to his face.
“How many are there, do you know?” was all that Peter thought to ask.
Heilant shook his head and reached to tug at it.
“Not here.” The printer cinched it tighter between arm and ribs.
“Then come to me. And we will put them side by side.” Heilant’s color had returned. But there was still repulsion in his eyes. “It isn’t right. I’ve never seen its like. It was not made by any scribe.”
Soothingly, his hand as steady as a rock, Peter touched his arm. “We will examine them.” He willed his voice smooth. “Perhaps the answer is . . . entirely banal. Look at Lauber, he has a writing army now. Perhaps he has a pattern book as well.”
“I pray it’s so.” Heilant crossed himself. “But everything about it leaves a dread upon my soul.”
They parted, Peter promising to come as soon as he was able. He hurried down the lane, passing the Humbrechthof, slowing for an instant to be sure he could hear nothing through its outer wall. Please God, he prayed. His legs strode on past St. Quintin’s, then to the master’s house upon its knoll. He came around to the back door and pounded, his hand coiled tightly in the biting cold.
Lorenz looked startled, dragged from sleep, when finally he opened. The master wasn’t there.
Where was he then, God damn him? Peter cursed and spun. Courting favor with the archbishop’s men, coaxing coins from merchants, Elders, sousing with whoever paid inside some hole? Scrounging for another piece of tripe that he could spin from lead to gold? Where was he, when it came right down to it, when he was needed? Peter turned back to the workshop, frozen through. The man was gone—had left them, as he always did, to clean up the mess he left behind.
“Let me see it.” Heilant creased one pamphlet open, then the other, to the selfsame page. Peter traced an a, then moved his finger to the a upon the other page. “Indeed,” he said. “Extremely strange.”
There was an unaccustomed bustle in the Schreibhaus common room that night. The back was filled with strangers in a jumble of dark robes; the roads were full these days with delegations, Heilant said. Peter looked up at the counter where the food and drink were served, and saw an orphan pamphlet in plain view.
“Two of a kind,” he whispered into Heilant’s ear. “Let’s make a flush, and see.”
He rose and palmed the lonely booklet. There was a tray for coins, a lettered notice in the master’s hand. He dropped five shillings in and winced.
“Now then.” He sat down again.
“Look at these lines.” Heilant’s voice was low. “Exactly even, with the breaks in the same place.”
“This one’s the same,” said Peter grimly.
“It is some devilry.” The scribe and lektor’s eyes were opened wider than he’d ever seen them. “No hand but Satan’s could create such symmetry.” He stared at Peter, thick lids lifted, like a child caught in a lie. “No human hand could write precisely the same line, a dozen times.”
Peter mimed a thoughtful stroking of his beard, and glanced around the room. “It seems to me it is some kind of stamp,” he whispered.
“Stamp?” Heilant’s full lips opened slightly; a look of merriment, derision, filled those open eyes. “Come now, be serious.”
“You know, the way Cusanus had them carve the Pater Noster.” Peter made a show of running one flat finger on the page. “It punches, like those stamps they carve from wood.”
Heilant peered closely at it. “I see no grain.” He licked his lips and raised his eyes with a bare smile. “This is not wood. Not quite.” Suddenly, his look was snide. “You know much more, I think, than you let on.”
“Not wood?” said Peter lightly, as his stomach jolted.
“You play with metal, it’s well known. And not just for those mirrors.”
Peter looked him full in his soft, flabby face. Heilant would not be so easily diverted. He dropped his voice and leaned with menace toward the monk. “You ought not say such things out loud.” He looked around. “Especially not here.”
The scribe recoiled, but there was enmity in his small eyes. “If I were you, I’d watch the game you play.”
“No game.” Peter sat back. “But strictest orders. You’ll keep your comments to yourself—or you will answer to His Grace—or Rosenberg.”
For an instant Heilant chewed on this. But he’d not gained his rank without a streak of most self-serving cunning. His smile was acid. “Then it’s a good thing, don’t you think, I answer to them both already?”
Each page was tied with twine on the composing stone for him to proof as it arrived. He was teasing out wrong letters with a pick the night he got an answer to that question. It was a few days past Saint Stephen, and that year of woe was nearly at its end. Heilant’s threat was unambiguous. But he could turn to neither partner: the only father he could count on was the Father of them all.
He rose and went out to the courtyard, toward the granary, where all the finished quires were stacked. How often of an evening had he come to check on them with Gutenberg, tucking the waxed cloth as a mother tucks her babe. A pain traversed him: he couldn’t trust the scheming bastard now, no more than he could hope for help from Fust. His father was a broken dike, his power trickling and dispersed, while Gutenberg was wild and uncontained, a risk to the whole workshop. Now, at least, the scales had fallen from his eyes. Peter had been shown, by each man’s carelessness, his weakness, that he alone had been entrusted to complete this work.
He and Fust had managed to prevail, at least, on Gutenberg to box up the remaining prophecies and send them out of Dietrich’s jurisdiction, down the river to Cologne. In the days since, the master had stopped by a few times to check on the workshop. But then, dog-faced, embittered, he had had the grace to leave the crew alone.
The snow fell softly, silently, out of the winter blackness; Peter stood and watched the way it drew the whole dark Humbrechthof beneath its soft white cloak. A few small squa
res of gold were all that showed, the firelight playing on the paper they had pressed into the windows in vain hope of sealing in the heat. It was past time to shut the heavy wooden shutters. The newly printed sheets would then be shifted to the shed the minute they were dry, Peter thought as he returned in his own tracks across the courtyard. A drumming sound caught his attention far off to the north, but though he waited, he heard nothing more. He entered. All dozen men were busy, half a dozen boys; the clock had just struck five. He stooped to seat himself by Hans. “Snow all night,” he said. “Best get the lads to bring more wood.” Hans put down his stick and stretched his fingers and his hands. “Freeze all them spies too in their beds—that’s good.” He gave Peter a keen look.
And yet he spoke too soon: the sound of hoofbeats came, now close enough that Peter knew the sound as that low, distant pounding he had heard before. “Sshhh!” He sprang up, out to the main room, his long arms lifted toward the pressmen. “Hold off.” He drew a finger at his neck to silence all that grunt and clatter. To a man the crew froze, listening intently, fingers flexing, muscles taut, hearing the hoofbeats thudding ever closer. In half a minute they were right outside, a body’s breadth from their stout outer wall, trampling the snow to ice along the lane. It was unusual, to say the least, to hear a squad of horsemen in the city just as winter darkness closed the gates.
“Four horsemen,” Hans said, deadpan; Peter rolled his eyes. He bid them wait, went out with Wiegand, hoisting him to spy above the wall. “Four, aye,” the boy said, sliding down, “two black, two bay.”
“Which way?”
“St. Martin’s.”
“What livery?”
“I couldn’t see.”
A feeling of tremendous fear swiped through Peter at the very instant they both clearly heard a soft yet rhythmic tapping at the courtyard door. “Quick,” he said, “silent, now, close up the shutters.”
He went with slow, cold feet toward the little door cut in the portal. “Who’s there?” he hissed through solid oak.
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