Peter proofed the trial page himself, to guarantee the gaps the metal squares made were sufficient. He drew three dozen rounded Lombards, carmine red and azure blue, then held the page up to show to Mentelin and Hans. They marveled. Gutenberg was tickled, too—as much with Hans’s ingenuity as with that startling beauty. The master cackled when he saw those spacing quads, and elbowed the old smith. “Too bad you never had a twin. I could have used you for old Sibyl.” He stuck out his tongue and made a little taunting face at Peter. He’d made a hash of that whole prophecy, and they both knew it. He might have drafted several men, but he had likely set those lines himself—he was just proud and stubborn enough to attempt it. He was no better, though, at setting than at carving; as Hans had said, he couldn’t carve to save his life.
Yet let the man who has not sinned cast the first stone.
As soon as he began to set those psalms, Peter saw that he’d miscalculated in the counting of the lines. The quire he set would come up half a column short; to his frustration, the next quire was already printed off and dried.
“Blind me,” he exclaimed, and slapped his type stick on his thigh.
Mentelin, his green eyes narrowed, leaned to see.
“Short a dozen.” Peter ground his teeth. “Blind me, curse my eyes.”
The gold-scribe counted lines beneath his breath. “Just stretch the whole thing out and short the page before. If God is with you, you can get them to align. No one will see.”
They sat there, pulling at their lips. “In any case,” said Mentelin, and turned on him his easy smile: “To err is human—to forgive, divine.”
“So I have heard.”
“And did you know,” his friend went on, his red head tilted, “that in the Muslim creed they are prohibited from striving for perfection that might rival God’s?” His eyes were calm, his freckled cheeks serene. “Their artists therefore take the greatest care to put an error in each book or painting.”
“What error?” came the master’s voice. He had an otherworldly tuning of his senses to the workshop’s sounds. For all the din, he must have heard the way that Peter slapped his type stick down; he poked his beak into the room.
“The lines are short.” Sourly, Peter shrugged.
“Whose fault is that?” There was no trace in him of anything that might be called remorse; it was appalling.
“Mine,” was all his foreman said, and they locked eyes for just the briefest instant. The master made a face, but he retreated.
Peter watched his back. The man could never say as much—he’d never, ever, admit a mistake. Since Peter crossed him in the square, he’d barely spoken to him, except for things related to the work. Peter had dared to challenge him, to call him to account. And in response, the master cut him off; by this refusal he rebuked him. Admitting nothing, coiled into himself, hard as a chunk of iron ore. Eventually he’d let it go, as he had done a dozen times before. He’d act as if it never even happened. Never alluding afterward to anything, as if the pain, the trust betrayed, did not exist.
To err was human, though.
Peter looked at Mentelin, all copper gentleness and mercy. How hard Peter had now become, his old friend Grede had said.
“And if the error is not by intent?” he asked. “Instead an accident—of pride?” He saw himself, with horror, in the master’s brittle, brutal mirror.
He too had coiled into himself—had been unwilling to admit his error.
Mentelin looked up and smiled. “We all are sinners, Peter. All of us. Me and him and you included.”
He took the lettered sample, rolled it and tied it with a ribbon. How boastful now that psalm did seem: With expectation I have waited for the Lord. As if the Lord owed him or anyone a thing. He went out in the fields to find the early lilies of the valley as the ground began to thaw. The earth was there, resurgent, always underneath their feet, a greening present they unwrapped anew each spring. He gathered up the tender waxen bells with care. He walked for hours, mind churning, seeking the right words. At last the best that he could do was this: My love, can you forgive me?
He would have given anything to see her face when it arrived, to know if he would be allowed to hope. This was his punishment: submitting to the consequence of his own pride. He would not push her for an answer either. A day went by, another day; he could not eat or sleep. He set the letters in their lines; he threw them back; he set another page; he prayed.
On the third day he went to the marketplace, for it was market day. He was as rigid as a statue standing there beneath St. Martin’s eaves. A glimpse, he told himself: a glimpse is all, then I will know. Grede bent above the onions and the leeks; Anna was there behind her: fine small head, a basket at her elbow, swathed in a green shawl. He watched them speaking, Anna gravely, Grede embracing her with two swift pecks on either cheek. Anna nodded, walking briskly toward the chapel where he lurked.
He burned with shame. Would he leap out like some mad, costumed ghoul? Or simply shrink and, when she passed, slink back? He had no right to press her. Yet as she passed she must have sensed his presence; she turned her head, and looked. Her eyes burned fiercely, then her cheeks.
“Please,” he said, and stretched out his right hand.
Her own hand crept up to the clasp that held her cloak. “I—wanted—to write back.” Her voice was a bare rasp.
“If we could only speak—,” he said.
“Not here.” She glanced about.
“I know a place,” he said, and stepping from the column touched her elbow, prayed she’d follow as he swiftly left the square. He climbed the hill beyond the church of John the Baptist toward the stock market, into that bitter, pungent fug. Before the little-trafficked side lane that he knew, he turned around to watch her walk, her linen skirt hiked up above the straw and muck. “No place to take a lady,” he said, looking for a place that they might sit.
“You needn’t fear,” she said coolly, and followed him along the empty stalls. He found a wooden crate and turned it up into a stool. She did not take the hand he offered but stepped lightly, wrinkling her nose. The stench was choking: fur and sweat and urine and manure.
He cursed himself; the place was foul. “You deserve far better,” he said, turning up a bucket, pulling it to where she sat. She shrugged. “I’ve seen far worse.”
And then she waited, that small oval face, the deep, dark eyes made even deeper by the paleness of her skin, a bruising of fatigue in rings beneath them. Her cheekbones were more prominent; how she had suffered, Peter thought.
Their knees were almost touching.
“I wronged you. Terribly. I let my pride destroy it all.”
She did not move; her eyes roved over his whole face, as if to probe it for sincerity or hollowness.
“I never answered—it was all my fault. I was too—shattered, too disturbed by your rejection.”
“What I rejected was not you.” She held her hands clasped lightly in her lap. “It was the thing you did, that seemed to me a blasphemy.” She pulled her lips in with her teeth, and looked away, and frowned. “I would have told you, if you’d ever even let me.”
“It meant so much to me.” He shook his head. “I could not bear that you refused.”
She gave a little laugh. “Refused? Who did the refusing? Your father would not look me in the eye. Your master—well.” She shook her head, her nostrils flaring. “He threatened me, if you recall. And you.” For the first time she looked, with vehemence, into his eyes. “You—went away, you sucked the life out of the world, and tossed it down like rags.”
“I know.” He was a husk, unworthy of her love. He could not look at her; he kept his eyes upon her hands. “I was a fool. An arrogant, obnoxious ass.” He shook his head and almost whispered it. “I felt that I was touched by God.”
He raised his eyes at last and saw the way she looked at him, with pity and a certain tenderness. She reached one hand out, touched his cheek.
“As are we all.”
He felt a rush
of feeling surge through his whole body: love, despair, a rawness without words. How light she was, how wise, the way she spoke and felt and moved so modest and so graceful. Unlike him—overweening, swollen thick with self-regard.
“You are too good for me,” he said, and felt his heart crack as he said it.
“If that were so, we would not be here face-to-face.” She glanced with meaning at the shit and muck and made a show of wrinkling her nose. “You might at least have brought me scent,” she said, and in the tilting of her head, the fleeting smile that inked her lips, he knew he was forgiven.
“You shall have scent, and any other thing your heart desires.”
“I have but one desire,” she said, and leaned toward him, soft lips meeting his harsh mouth. He took her up into his arms, light as a lamb in May, the smell and touch of her a feast after the months of desert. He kissed her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her neck, lifting and spinning her, his arms wrapped tightly all around her, crushing her to him with such fervency that he could feel her heartbeat thrumming like a bird’s.
LETTERS
CHAPTER 1
SUNDAY BEFORE JOHN THE BAPTIST
[58 of 65 quires]
23 June 1454
THE AFTERNOON of that midsummer’s eve, Peter took his intended wife out walking past the waters of the Bleiche. Above them rose a checkerboard of yellow flax and tawny wheat, girded by the dark green ribbons of the hedgerows of the Altmünster. The bees were drinking greedily from blossoms rising up from the baked earth. Anna raised her eyes toward the convent. “For a while I thought that I, too—,” she began to say, but Peter turned her face and kissed her quiet, murmuring, “Then I’d have had to break the wall down.”
They clasped each other’s hands and pushed on through the waving grass. The convent buildings were unscalable, he thought, a prison for those surplus daughters. All those Elder girls were penned there, spinning, sewing, baking, praying, giving confession to that toady Heilant—while every John the Baptist from this day on, the two of them would pick the mugwort, gaining strength for their life’s journey.
The plants grew along a rock wall just below the cloister. They gathered up the blossoms in her basket. Anna held one golden flower up. “Luck.” She smiled. The blossom had four petals and not five. “See, even nature can surprise us.”
“Only God is perfect.” Peter took it from her fingers. “Mentelin told me years ago that Muslim craftsmen add an error into everything they make.” He gave a little laugh. “We needn’t fear that we have overreached. We’ve made as many errors with our type as any scribe.”
She put a hand up to his cheek. “So it is not so different, then.”
He looked away across the waving, buzzing fields. “I pray not. I always hoped that we might reach as great an artistry with this new craft as with the old.”
She laced her fingers into his and brought the blossom to her nose. “I pray as well. That come what may, we never lose our hands, our touch—this closeness to the Lord’s Creation.”
They left the fields by a small gate that opened on the lane below the cloister. From that high up, the river was a broad and lazy finger pointing north. “Bingen, Koblenz, then Cologne,” he told her, gesturing toward the places they would go. “And thence to Rotterdam and Amsterdam.” He traced the future’s contours in the air.
“Is that a sermon on the mount I hear?” The faintly mocking voice was not a foot away behind the wall. Its owner’s head poked up, sandy-haired and pink of cheek.
“That is your bailiwick, I think.”
On that slope, for once the scribe—confessor, lektor, spy—stood just at Peter’s height and could look straight into his eyes. More was the pity, Peter thought, for eyes did mirror a man’s soul, and Heilant’s were like tarnish on a glass. Half a minute later he appeared along the lane, a little smirk on his broad face.
“So you do have a light you hide.” He winked and bowed, hands clasped before his ample waist, at Anna. “The honor is all mine.”
“Petrus Heilant, Anna Pinzler,” Peter said. “Confessor here, and once a fellow scribe.” He dwelt an instant on the “once.” Heilant had tucked up his summer habit in his belt, exposing a white tunic. He had been resting, it would seem, among the apple trees in that extensive orchard.
Anna bent her head devoutly.
“What brings you up this high?” Heilant, hands laced, gave him a wry smile. He meant the word in every sense, undoubtedly. How quickly men put on the manners of their stations: he too, no less than Heilant.
“Saint Bildnis knew to choose the finest view,” he answered. “One dear to every child of Mainz.”
“Indeed,” said Heilant.
“I don’t imagine you’ll enjoy it long though—will you?” Laconically he needled him. He had no doubt the monk had fingered them to his superiors. Yet he felt calm, almost relieved: the word was out, yet they had dodged the worst. “There is a parish in your future, I am certain,” he told Heilant almost gaily.
“Perhaps.” Heilant looked strangely at him. “Some of us must do as we are told.”
“I am no freer.”
“Oh, no?” Heilant cocked one eyebrow. “You do quite well there, in your little workshop.”
Anna glanced between them, sensing all that was unsaid, and Peter squeezed her hand.
“I mind my business,” he said softly. The world would know at last. In six more weeks the truth of what they did would dazzle the whole Rhineland.
“Quite lucrative, that business.” Heilant’s voice was odious.
Sharply Peter said, “You’ve done enough. Leave it alone.”
“Unless”—the full lips lifted in a taunting smile—“you’re not apprised—have not been cut in on the latest?” The man was like a snake, coiled up and waiting on the sunbaked road. Peter shook his head and tasted bile; he tucked his love’s hand in his arm and turned to go.
“I would have thought, since you know all, that you had heard about the Frankfurt order.” The scribe was smiling widely now, his eyes glittering with triumph.
“What order?” Anna asked, when Peter gripped her arm.
“A full indulgence from the pope. For the Crusade. He ordered some ten thousand. I’m surprised you haven’t heard.”
“To fund an army,” Anna whispered. Heilant nodded; Peter felt her fear.
The stock phrase issued like a tapeworm from inside: “He’ll need an army, then, of scribes.” He kept his face impassive as he realized. Of course the Holy See would offer new confessionalia; it stood to reason they would use this means to raise the funds for the Crusade.
“Metal scribes, no doubt,” said Heilant with his leering, knowing smile.
“Who told you this?”
Heilant’s chin rose almost infinitesimally. “I hear much more than you imagine.”
Fust was in Calais to see what English merchants had for sale; no longer did he patronize Venetian thieves who trafficked with the Turk and sold the spoils in Bruges. He was at least two weeks away.
“So tell me straight.” Peter stood there, drained. “Who Dietrich told to make them.”
Heilant laughed so suddenly and easily, they knew his mirth was real. And then he looked at Peter, wiping at the creases of his eyes—as if the printer were some village dunce, a sad thing only to be pitied. “Come now,” he said. “You know as well as I.”
He walked her home, and she released him, understanding, to retrace his steps back to the Cobblers’ Lane. The shutters were unseeing eyes to either side, indifferent, sun-blistered. He turned into the Quintinstrasse, turned again into their cul-de-sac and fit the key into the lock and entered, crossed the courtyard and unlocked the workshop door.
Inside thin slats of light leaked in, casting bright stripes on the equipment. The presses loomed like crouching beasts, swathed in their thick protective cloths: how much they’d learned, not least about the dust—how even a small mote on the bed could throw the type from true.
He walked the passage from the door pas
t the composing room, down the long drying hall, then back again toward his desk—the master’s desk. The movement of the air he swept behind him set twelve hundred sheets to rustling on the lines. He stopped and tilted up his head and breathed the sweet yet acrid odor of the ink that scented all their nights and days.
After everything they’d done together. Please God, let this not be true.
He’d hammered, and he’d carved, and mixed so many metals at the master’s side. He’d etched his letters while the master etched those visions in his mind. Impossible, his foreman thought: he’d risked it once—but even Gutenberg would not be arrogant enough to risk it all once more.
Peter pushed one shutter open and sat and pulled the proof sheets toward him. Each one was lettered at the bottom corner with a faint brown scratch. He checked their order with the master book, and closed his eyes. How close they were. Last night he’d taken the completed quire of Acts of the Apostles to the storeroom: one hundred eighty copies of each folded set, five sheets that made another twenty pages of this Book of Books.
He wondered as he sat there how they’d even had the heart to start. God knew they’d had no notion of the effort it would cost. Yet it was willed, and nearly done; he’d pledged his father they would have it finished by Autumn Fair. There were just four quires left to set and proof and print, eighty pages out of those twelve hundred sixty-two—and then the forty extra copies of the first three quires, for it was only after those first few that Peter found the faster way of casting, and they decided to print more. Print more! How eager and fevered they had been! He drove the men now more like oxen, heads down, straining up the inclines. Day after day the ink balls hissed, the presses ground, their fingers flew from case to stick. They labored as though sprinting toward some shining vision—driven toward that final page. Apocalypse. He felt a chill and looked back down.
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