His father’s house was not the grandest of all the timbered merchant homes that ringed the Brand. Yet it was imposing, like the man himself: broad and solid with an unexpected grace inside. Its floors were of blue slate, its yellow walls warmed by new tapestries from France and Flanders—though in the heat of this late summer these were rolled away, the window gaps all hung with gauze.
His foster father had the big man’s way of crushing those he loved against the ample shelf that was his stomach. And then he held Peter at arm’s length. “At last.” He smiled.
“You knew full well which boat I would be on.”
“Yet still I watched for every one.” Johann Fust had eyes as blue as Mary’s vestments in a face that with the years and success had reddened and filled. One eye winked.
“Then you’ll have noticed I come empty-handed.” Peter rolled his eyes.
“They stopped you then? At Speyer?”
“You might have warned me.”
His father squeezed his shoulder. “Nothing that a shilling in a palm won’t fix. What matters is that you’re home.” Fust turned as Grede stepped out into the hall. His father’s wife looked wan, but on her lips still played the wry smile she had always worn. “Wonder of wonders.” She turned her cheek to his. “I’d given up all hope you’d see your brother before he could hold a stylus.”
“I left the Palace of the Louvre in some despair.” He grinned and bowed, raking the floor with one limp hand. “To grace ye people in your humble homes.”
She laughed. And yet his father’s bright young bride—his second, and a kind of sister to Peter—appeared exhausted: as if, having survived once more the terror of the childbirth bed, she had at last left youth behind. She had not looked this way when she bore Christina five years before.
They went on to the big front room and stopped before a cradle. Fust took the bundle in his arms. “We call him Henchin. Little Hans,” he said with unmasked pride. The baby yawned, its face scrunched up like an old wizened apple. Its eyes flew open, blue as those that gazed in wonderment down on them. Peter put a finger to the tiny fist, and bent to kiss the tiny head. He’d never had a sister or a brother who shared his own blood; his mother died in bearing him. He’d been saved, adopted into this fine house, by her first cousin, Fust’s first wife. Gently he unwound the little clinging fingers. He’d grown to manhood in these walls. But this in no way meant he held a claim against this little red-faced chap—only because of his late arrival had Peter been welcomed years before into this house.
All through the meal that followed Peter watched his father, hoping for some sign. Grede had put out beeswax candles and her prized Venetian glass. The cook had made roast lamb, potatoes, chard, some fowl baked in a pie. They’d wash it down with Rheingau from St. Jakob’s vines. Peter had brought gifts: a calfskin workbook for Tina, five by now and as primped and blond as any cherub, and a baby’s beechwood game of catch-a-bob. The servants filed in silently as Fust stood, leafing with a frown through a worn pocket Bible. “A reading from Saint Matthew,” he said finally, and cleared his throat. “Whose birth we honor in these days.”
Peter caught Grede’s eye. Since when did Fust say blessings at the table? The ban, she mouthed back, nostrils flaring. Dietrich backed his own class, naturally; the lower orders might pretend to rule, but they would have to fall in line. There’d be no sacraments until the upstart council had backed down. The archbishop’s word was law: none of his priests would say a mass or take confession; the newly born were unbaptized and the dying were deprived of their last rites, consigned forever to the agony of limbo. Grede’s face was dark with anger.
You have heard that it hath been said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other; And if a man will contend with thee in judgment, and take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him.
Fust looked up and fixed his elder son with shining eyes.
You have heard that it hath been said, “Thou shalt love your neighbor, and hate thine enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.
The assembled foreheads flickered in the candlelight. Fust bowed his large and white-fringed head. Had he chosen that passage just for him? Peter wondered. It wouldn’t be the first time. He tried and failed to catch Fust’s gaze. What message did his father mean to send? Acceptance of injustice, and the stilling of one’s own desires? Impatience flooded him as he stood waiting, willing Fust to make the meaning of this journey clear.
“Though we may chafe, let’s not forget the wisdom of the scriptures.” Fust signaled for the wine. “Nor, on this joyous day when Peter has returned, dwell overmuch on persecution. The fathers of the church were far more persecuted in their time.”
He smiled and raised his goblet to toast Peter. And Peter, chilled, raised his. How should he not? He owed Fust everything. He could not see into the merchant’s heart, yet he could guess what Fust saw every time he looked at Peter: the boy he’d raised, the life he’d forged, the skills and travels he’d unstintingly bestowed. The life of mud and dung from which he’d raised the grubby offspring of his first wife’s cousin. A line appeared in Peter’s mind, as fresh as if old Cicero had penned it just that instant: There is no more essential duty than returning kindness.
Words of guidance, penned in deep antiquity and carried forward through the long, dark centuries by Christian scribes.
“The feast of Saint Matthew is auspicious for all business ventures.” Fust’s teeth were gleaming in the torchlight. Peter waited, long legs stretched out from the willow chair. The heat of the day had left the air of the courtyard warm and scented by the rose, and from the lane beyond he smelled the tang of fruit, the thick hot earthiness of livestock. He heard the call of owls, the intermittent roar out of the gaming house—those old, familiar sounds.
“What do you mean?” he asked, when Fust did not continue.
“Just that I have a proposition.” His father sat upright.
Which I may not refuse. “And this is why you called me back.”
“We have a chance to shape the future.” Fust leaned forward, peering at him in the dusk. “You and I together, I mean.”
“I shape the future now,” said Peter, straightening.
“Not quite like this.”
“I haven’t had a chance to write to tell you”—Peter spoke as though he hadn’t heard—“that I’ve been asked to join the rector’s office at the university.”
“Ah,” said Fust.
“Imagine how the trade could benefit,” his son went on. “I’ll see them first, whichever titles he selects. We’ll know exactly what the market will demand.”
The last time Fust passed through Paris, he’d asked his son to act as scout: to scour the stalls where books were sold across from Notre Dame, to keep his ears pricked and so learn the titles that the firm might sell to buyers east of the Rhine. Peter, meanwhile, toured him through the scribal workshop, one of dozens serving that great university. He showed him all the stacks of sections—written out by hand, then lent to students who would write out their own copies—hundreds of them, not only by the Greeks and Romans but the greatest scholars of the day: Duns Scotus, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas. Those ink-stained scribes were like a mighty army, Fust had marveled, ranks of angels on the move.
“You said you envied me, when you last came to Paris.”
“That’s true.” His father pulled the flesh beneath his chin. “But that was all before I met this man.”
“This ‘most amazing man.’” Peter made no attempt to disguise his scorn.
“Look first.” His father reached into his lap, brought out a set of folded sheets, and laid them on the table. “Just look. And then I think you’ll understand.
”
The quire—five folded, nested sheets—was of parchment of middling quality. Part of a schoolbook, judging by its short, square shape. Peter recognized at once the Latin grammar of Donatus: he had written out those declinations a thousand times. A common, tawdry work; he looked up, horrified.
“Feel,” his father said, and flipped the booklet to its last, blank page. He lifted Peter’s finger, rubbed it lightly on the empty space.
He felt a stippling, a kind of roughness on the hide. As if the parchment maker had not scraped the skin entirely smooth. He rubbed two fingers, three, and all at once they sensed a strange, sharp symmetry. He flipped the page back to its written side. His blood jumped then, his palms grew damp. The textura lettering was squat and ugly, yet every string of letters was unnervingly even, all across the line. Each of those lines ended with an utter, chilling harmony, at precisely the same distance from the edge. What hand could write a line that straight, and end exactly underneath the one above? What human hand could possibly achieve a thing so strange? He felt his heart squeeze and his soul flood with an overwhelming dread.
“You see now. Why I had to call you back.” Fust’s voice was high.
“What work is this? What hand did this?”
“No hand.” His father took his fingertip again. “Feel how it sinks? The way the ink lies not on top, but in a hollow in the skin?”
Peter closed his eyes to sense it more precisely. It was as Fust had said. The parchment yielded in some way: it was not smooth beneath the ink, as when he wrote it with his pen. “Whose work is this?” he said again.
Fust’s heavy face was shining. “This man they call Gutenberg has found a way to make the letters out of metal. He lays the ink upon each one, then stamps them in the page.”
Peter raised it to his eyes. So close that he could see the faint depression, a slope so slight as to be almost imperceptible: from the surface to the gully of each stroke. The space in which the angels—or the devil, surely—danced upon a pin. He could not speak at first, the shock was so extreme.
“I was approached by a man who knew I dealt in books.” His father mopped his brow, as if relieved to share this thing at last. “Gutenberg sought an investor, I was told. I went to see him, and he showed me this.” The man wouldn’t show him more, though, he told Peter, nor divulge how it was done. For his part, he’d been mystified, he added: he had never heard of any Elder family having anything to do with books. He’d thought that man’s whole clan content with running half the abbeys and the Mint, and weaving gold from wholesale cloth they sold beneath St. Martin’s eaves.
“I thought, like you,” he said as he pressed Peter’s hand, “that it was just another of those wretched grammars. But then this Gutenberg said he made it with a new technique. Ars impressoria, he calls it. To think he’s been at work at this, in secret, just a lane or two away. . . .
“You know the house.” Peter heard the words dimly through the roaring in his brain. “The Hof zum Gutenberg, on Cobblers’ Lane.”
“I have a trade,” he said thickly and flung the sheets back on the table.
But Fust by then was standing, pacing, giving not the slightest indication he had heard. “It’s not the evenness—that’s just one part of it!” His voice was high; his cheeks were flushed. He had a canny and familiar look on his trader’s face—yet also a strange expression Peter didn’t think he’d ever seen. A kind of ravishment, an exaltation. Fust turned and fired a question. “It would take you how long—four days, five?—to copy this?”
“Two days. At most.” Peter was fast, and young, and proud.
“In those two days, this Gutenberg can make, by ‘printing,’ as he calls it, half a dozen copies, each one perfectly alike.” Fust came around the table and reached for Peter’s wrist. “Without the need to wear your fingers to the bone.”
His son was pinned, immobile. Fust loomed above him, blocking out the bright stars in the sky.
“Imagine it! My God, you have to see what this will mean. We can make ten times, twenty times as many copies of a book—in the same time and at the same cost.” His father’s hands were flailing in the air. “A book like this—or even longer ones. It’s limitless.” The look of wonder was replaced by triumph. He dropped a hand on Peter’s shoulder and shook him hard. “The moment I saw it, I was certain. This is the miracle the Lord has been preparing for us all along.”
“A blasphemy, more like, or just some shoddy trick.” Peter shook Fust’s hand off, reached back for the printed sheets. In truth that booklet was a soulless, lousy thing. The letters were as rough as those cheap woodcarvings that the Dutchmen hawked; the lines were blotchy and the edges slopped with ink.
Fust darkened. Then he straightened, and wiped a hand across his face. “But you must see. It is no accident that brought you here. Each step that brought you to this house, each book we’ve seen and sold, or that you yourself have written. What were they all, if not a preparation? What is our purpose here, if not for you to learn this blessed art?”
“Blessed?” Peter jerked his hand; the pamphlet dropped. He stood and pushed the chair away. “This is no art. Who is the scribe here, you or I?” He shook his head. “I am a master of this art, as you well know. I have a trade, a life.”
“You’ve had your wander years.” His father’s voice was curt. “They’ve gone on long enough. I need you here.” His feet were planted and his look severe.
“You’d keep me here?” It came out as a bleat.
“I shouldn’t even have to ask.”
Peter felt his face flame up. And still he twisted, scrabbling for a handhold. “I never heard of any Elder lifting up a tool. What proof have you that this man Gutenberg has even made this in the way you say?”
The thing could easily have been a carved wood plate, as crude as any made to crank out images of saints and the few letters of their names.
“I am told that a goldsmith does the carving and the casting of the metal shapes.”
“A smith.” The very word was leaden. Fust had tried once already to make a smith of him, a goldsmith like his uncle Jakob, and their father before that—and when that didn’t take, a merchant or a lawyer. But Peter had found a trade all his own and had excelled. Must Fust now snatch it all away?
His father had lent this man vast sums. Now he would lend him his own son. Not his only begotten, though, Peter thought, the anger surging. He was no longer that.
“Do it,” his father said. “For me.”
Peter heard the words of Jesus, on that dreadful eve. Do this, in memory of me.
“It is a shock, I know.” Fust’s voice was gruff. “But at least try to see. This is the change for which I’ve prayed.”
A man would leave a legacy, Peter heard him say. The feeling that his sojourn on this earth was not for naught. The words, however well meant, rose and circled like a noose around his throat.
“Will you not let me choose?” he whispered, already knowing.
Fust held his eyes for a long moment. “I think that God has long since chosen for us both.”
The Hof zum Gutenberg backed onto the Cobblers’ Lane and looked out on its parish church, St. Christopher’s, atop a knoll that banked down steeply toward the river. The place was featureless and grim; Peter looked in vain for any grace on its gray facade. There were three granite steps, a massive door, a knocker. His father wore a tunic made of red velour. Too fine, his son thought, standing in his shadow, waiting for Fust’s arm to rise, the iron ring to lift and drop. Peter stood immobile in his plain dark breeches and his one good shirt, still reeking from the journey. Just as he’d stood as a boy of ten, when sent to Fust: the sudden, piercing memory returned. That awkward, silent lad, bathed carefully and dressed, put on the market cart to Mainz—clad in what to those grand folk must have seemed like rags. How frightened he had been, how stiff in his desire to please lest he be put back on the cart and sent away.
The man beyond this door was an Elder—a patrician of the highest rank and und
oubtedly haughty. Fust dressed to show that though a merchant, he was just as rich. A strange alliance, when Mainz was riven between the old clans and the rising trading class. This Gutenberg was one of those who held the city ransom, thanks to Dietrich’s iron fist: a member of the old elite that ran the courts, the commerce, and the churches—and most of all sucked income from the loans that bled the city dry.
“A leech, then,” Peter had observed, as he tried to worm out information over breakfast.
“More of a pragmatist, I think.” Fust shrugged and cracked his hard-cooked egg. “I hear he’s viewed with some suspicion by his peers.” The man had only recently returned to Mainz; he’d spent some thirty years in Strassburg. Which did explain, to some extent, why no one knew just what to make of him. He’d put out a story that he was making trinkets for the pilgrim trade in hopes of keeping prying eyes away.
The merchant dropped the knocker several times, then started pounding. With every fruitless blow his neck grew redder. He cursed beneath his breath and was about to turn when finally they heard a grinding sound. A bolt was wrenched, the door burst outward, and the two of them sprang back. In the entry stood the master of the house, unlikely as it was for any scion of an Elder clan to answer his own front door. Yet judging from the clothes, it had to be: he wore a belted linen tunic and shoes with silver buckles, though there was grime on both his leggings and his rolled-up sleeves.
Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel Page 2