Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  A wedge of starlings flashed above the muddy bank below, empty now of ships that once had jostled in a floating herd. How hollow the world seemed without the hoarse cries of the boatmen and the creaking of the cranes. A solitary man picked his slow way along the shore, and Peter pictured the lone figures stealing in at night, those priests that Grede had told him of from distant parishes who’d bless an infant, say a hurried prayer, or even ferry off a corpse for Christian burial for those few families with sufficient gold. The devil take the archbishop, Peter thought fiercely. Every citizen of Mainz was trapped, including him. He turned and started down.

  How he had scoffed at them—his father and his uncle, with their impotence and fury. His uncle, Jakob, most of all: the Brudermeister of the goldsmiths’ guild, who in Peter’s absence had been voted to the city council. How could a man waste his whole life in futile stewing? Better to carve out a life of the mind far from this dried-up husk. Fury rose and strangled Peter anew, to find himself once more a hostage to their endless wrangling.

  The feud in Mainz was ancient, and perhaps eternal: between the man who makes things—homo faber—and the man who trades what others make to his advantage. Mankind was greedy, grasping, Peter thought: it went straight back to Cain and Abel. In the archdiocese of Mainz, this conflict had destroyed the peace for all their lives. That first day the old smith thrust an apron and a glove at him, both stiff as armor plate. “I made the fire. You’ll make it from now on.” Hans Dünne looked skeptically at Peter’s slender wrists. “Let’s hope to God you can.”

  “Fust swears he took the teat right at the fire.” Gutenberg came toward them, lacing his own apron. “Though I would wager it has been a while.”

  “It isn’t something you forget,” said Peter.

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Let’s see those hands.” The master took each by the wrist and turned them. Peter’s right hand had a callus on each fingertip, the middle finger a thick rusty oval. His palms, though, were as pink as baby Henchin’s cheeks.

  “Sweet Jesus.” Gutenberg looked up, lips coy. “The last time I saw skin this soft—” He rolled his eyes. The old smith sniggered; Konrad, the big redhead, laughed and lumbered toward the press. Peter glanced at Keffer and caught his eye. By dint of twitches and squints, the journeyman conveyed the message that this master was as rabid as he seemed. With butcher’s skill, the man probed forcefully at the thick joints of Peter’s thumbs, then dropped them without warning. “You’d better know right now. I haven’t got much use for fancy hands.”

  Keffer was the only one to show the slightest friendliness. He made a point of shaking Peter’s hand as they were suiting up to face the flames. Thank God, he seemed to hold no grudge for what the scribe had said the day before.

  “The last face I had thought to see,” the goldsmith said and grinned. Back at Jakob’s shop he’d been a frisky lad without the slightest whisper of ambition. Half the time they’d played at divination with the drops of lead that landed in the water pot. Now he was huge, surmounted by a yellow beard and curls, his neck and shoulders thick and muscled as an ox.

  “And me.”

  “I thought you’d up and gone.”

  “Not far enough to slip the Fusts.”

  There was a flicker of surprise in Keffer’s light blue eyes. “At least you saw the world,” he said, and pulled the scarf above his lips and nose.

  “And you have made the grade.” The journeyman just nodded and handed Peter his own scarf. It must have been six years since they had toiled together. Strange, that after his four years apprenticing Keffer had done his wander years right here, and not gone out to seek his fortune. But maybe he had found a girl. He’d always been quite the magnet, with those honey-colored curls.

  Their master stood apart, bent over something at his desk. “Best watch your back,” said Keffer underneath his breath. Peter nodded, warmed; he could do worse for allies. The journeyman was just sweeping the jumbled letters from the workbench on a tray and moving it to the side to make a space for casting when Gutenberg whirled suddenly, a metal letter in his hand.

  “Look at this shit.” He moved toward them with alarming speed. “You know it, damn you, Hans. What smell has shit?”

  “It stinks, just like your mouth.” The old gnome wagged his head.

  The master’s laugh was a hard bark. “Damn right. Now move your sad bones over here.” Hans gave a loud sigh, peeling off his gloves with exaggerated care. The master waited, eyes hooded, revolving the hunk of metal between his fingers.

  When Hans arrived, he thrust it in their faces. Each man could see that it had buckled under pressure: the shank was twisted and the base had splayed. “Unadulterated, stinking shit. How can any smith call sludge like this a metal? No bloody wonder it won’t print.”

  He stood there for a moment, almost daring them.

  Hans took the twisted hunk and held it right up to his eyes. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Not soon enough.” Gutenberg looked balefully around at his small crew. Keffer shifted nervously. “What in God’s name did you put into it?” The master thrust his mug right up to Keffer’s.

  “Lead, tin, and copper,” Keffer answered without flinching.

  “Body of God,” the master muttered. “Weeks and weeks, and this is all you have to show for it.” He thrust his lips out, pulling at them; his eyes went inward as he stood there thinking. Hans scratched his flaking pate; the others waited.

  “Saint Jude, grant me patience,” Gutenberg said at last disgustedly, and raked his hair back with his hand. Impassively, he dropped his arm and coolly, in one long, unbroken motion, swept the heavy tray of letters to the ground. Keffer leapt back, wincing, a hair too slow to dodge the mass of lead. “Try again. I don’t care how you do it, do it right.” Gutenberg curled his tall, spare body toward the older smith. “Don’t make me do it all myself, by damn.”

  Hans, absorbed in the examination of the damaged letter, grunted without looking up. “Just let me think.”

  The master bared his teeth and stalked away, flinging instructions. The new boy was to smelt. Keffer was to wipe that goddamned smirk off. Hans would scare up some more tin. Konrad better teach that press of his to kiss the letters and not crush them.

  Hans put the spoon and basin, pennyweight, and cupel into Peter’s hands. Up close, he wasn’t quite as ancient as he seemed. The leathered folds and burnished pate were just the residue of an eternity spent screwing up his face against the flames. A madman and a midget, yoked bizarrely, Peter thought. He took the vessels and started slowly toward the forge.

  “It’s not a blessed sacrament.” Gutenberg’s voice came wheeling at his back. “You’ll move your tail here, boy, or you’ll feel my hand.”

  Under the law, the master was his father from the moment Peter entered his employ. In loco parentis: as apprentice, he belonged now to this madman, just as surely as if he’d been born his child. Unless a master beat a poor apprentice senseless, used him sorely, or punished him without due cause, no soul on God’s green earth—not guild, not church, not even his own kin—could intervene.

  The man whom Peter served marked out his territory like a wolf: lifting his leg, baring his fangs, establishing who led the pack. There was a canine aspect to him, with his thin lifted lips, the glowing points of amber in his eyes. Keffer told him later the whole episode had been intended to impress on Peter his low place. Gutenberg had spent the day before grousing about the merchant’s son who had been forced on him. Bad enough to have to beg—he had to take the grocer’s spawn as well. He was the kind of man who could not abide being reminded that he depended on another soul in the whole world than his own, anointed self.

  The work those first few months was brutal, mindless, and dull, designed to crush the spirit or to breed a craving to rise up and find some other, lower soul to crush. Peter swept and scoured, lit fires that choked the throat and stung the eyes. He rose before dawn to clear the piles of ash; he lay and lit and banked the day’s new fire. And t
hen he weighed the ores and ground them down. When he was finished with these tasks, the master found him others just as rote and stupid: sieving sand to mix with water to a paste inside the mold, cutting heaps of sheepskin into squares that they would use for printing off that Latin grammar.

  His thoughts revolved around a single word: escape. There had to be a way—more devious, perhaps, than he would normally have entertained. He did not feel he had a choice: he could not simply take his writing pouch and announce that he was going. His father would feel bound to cut him off and cast him out—pursue him, even, for a breach of contract. The only hope lay in some other work that might release him from this stinking Hades.

  Grede told him he should pray for patience. She knocked lightly on his door one night that first week when the household was asleep, saying she had seen his light beneath the door. “You do not rest,” she whispered. How could he? he responded. She sat upon the narrow bed, put her candle down, and frowned.

  “What I don’t understand is why he has to drag me into it. An idiot could work that forge.”

  She gave a quick shake of her head. “He needs you. He depends on you.” She watched him as he paced, creaking the floorboards, and put a warning finger to her lips. He stopped; they listened for an instant, but all was silent. “He trusts you, Peter.”

  “He said that in Paris too.” Not even half a year had passed since Johann Fust decreed that Peter ought to represent him there.

  “Things change.” She gave a little shrug. How satisfied she was to take what life dished out. He had always thought that there was more—had been lulled into believing he was destined for some higher calling.

  “I could have made him proud.” He saw himself deciding with the rector which new books were worthy of the work of copying. Composing one himself perhaps—a work of scholarship. “Now I’m to throw away my life.”

  “A life you’d not have had, except for him.” Grede looked at him, her dark head cocked. “As nor would I.”

  She too had been raised above the grinding labor of a working life. She was a furrier’s daughter, quick and fine of shape, whom Fust, then newly widowed, spied and made his second wife. Peter still remembered those first awkward months six years before, this girl his age appearing in his life. They’d circled warily, at first, but found with time that they were much alike.

  “So we are to be forever grateful?” Peter sneered.

  “He said he’d only do this, with this man, if he was sure he had someone there he could trust. He’s gone too much, he needs somebody on the spot. There’s too much hanging on it.” She looked at him with the frank, clear gaze he’d come to know in all those times that Fust was on the road—Peter writing when the day was done, Grede always stitching, laughing, telling stories by the fire. “He needs a surety, a pair of trusted eyes.”

  So Peter was not simply drudge, he realized, but spy.

  That master worked them fourteen hours a day each cursed day of every week. Sweating, stoking, crushing, pouring. They did not even get a pause to celebrate the Sabbath; despite a host of meetings between clergymen and council, Archbishop Dietrich’s ban remained in place. The one brute fact was work, and then dead sleep, as if the pope himself colluded with this Master Gutenberg.

  They cast no letters for the whole first month. Instead they smelted, wreathed in noxious smokes, to try to find a metal alloy that would hold. They stooped around the forge like witches, eyes red-rimmed, hands black, their faces draped in clotted veils. Peter ground the ores to powders and shoved them deep into the coals. Lead, tin, bismuth, iron, copper: it was his job to win the molten metal from the roaring fire, turn the dull earth into a shiny, deadly fluid. The master then would reach a claw, take out some drops to mix inside a beaker; he’d growl amounts that Peter noted on a parchment. The tests went on, each mixture entered in the scribe’s firm hand. Two of this, the master muttered. Four of that. Gutenberg would swirl the stinking streams together, lips drawn up, dashing the sweat from his long nose. Throw that slop out. Another drop. Ah yes, perhaps. He’d glance up, grimace, hand the beaker off to Hans.

  Hans poured it in the casting box and counted up to ten, then Keffer drew the cast letter from the mold. They craned to see. Sometimes the alloy hardened before it even left the beaker, other times it did not harden fast enough. The hollows in the mold might fill right up, but then the metal would disintegrate or snap when Keffer tried to draw it out. Each time the master scowled and pulled at his lip, and sat back down.

  For all this time he took no notice of his new apprentice, standing silently at his right hand. It seemed to Peter that he had no eyes for any living man. He would mutter to himself, or raise his head and snarl. By the blood of the saints. Cannot a runt among you fix a spoon? He did not eat unless Frau Beildeck brought the dishes to the workbench; he bent so low above the molten metal that great gobs of it adhered, then hardened, in his beard. It seemed to Peter that he sucked up every breath of air in that hot room.

  The others laughed at Peter when he washed his hands before the midday meal. They laughed louder when he dried them off and worked some tallow into his chapped skin. Both Hans and Konrad had come from Strassburg with the master and spoke mainly to each other in their strange Alsatian twang. Foreigners, said Keffer, glad to find a friendly face. The journeyman was nimble with his fingers, always drawing with a lump of coal: blank faces with breasts, a nest of thatch. What luscious lips he could show Peter, he’d wink and whisper, if they ever could get sprung. Peter whispered back that you could pay in Paris with silk stockings if you liked. He was no prude, for all the years he’d had to hold his lust in check on monastery stools. Another reason, as if any more were needed, to get free. He couldn’t take his pleasure here the way he had in Paris, unwatched and anonymous. He felt his cock stir at the thought of all those satin entries, the dim red lamps, the damp, inviting archways of the street of Saint-Denis.

  Fust stopped by once in mid-October, in between his autumn journeys, to check that things were “well in hand.” Choice words, his son thought darkly: “in hand” was what he was, his very essence. The master barely looked up at his partner, simply waved a splattered arm. “Godspeed on your work,” he let fly. “I’ll take the same for mine.”

  It was not God’s speed, no—the very opposite. September and October passed; the daylight hours began to wane. Yet strangely they could feel a force drag the shop forward, silver drop by silver drop. There was a movement there, excruciatingly slow, yet inexorable—though where it led them, none could say.

  And then one evening a change came.

  The master raised his head, eyes bright, as if he’d caught a scent. He rubbed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes.” The batch they’d made the day before had hardened just as soon as it was poured into the mold. This next batch they completed replicated that result. The letters sliding from the mold were crisp and hard; Konrad had run the first lot twenty times beneath the heavy press, and not a single one looked the worse for wear.

  “By God, I think that’s it.” Gutenberg turned to Hans and smacked him on the arm. “You look like hell, you know.” He thrust his chin toward Peter and pointed toward the ladle. “If we can get it right again, at scale, we’ll drink tonight!” He drew his bushy brows together, chanting it like some old alchemist: “Two tin, four lead. Then just a quarter of antimony—to stiffen your sad pricks.” He smiled—a brief, exhausted flash. Hans and Keffer laughed.

  Peter went to fetch the requisite amounts. The powdered ores were piled beside each other on a slate that Konrad had erected in a corner by the forge. “Not just a beaker, either,” Gutenberg hollered. “I want a bucket of the stuff.” He fake-punched Hans again. “And put some speed in, will you? I have got a wicked thirst.”

  Peter hurried. He scooped and hurried, smelted and hurried. It was this hurry that wrecked everything, he thought as he dashed the sweat away. The pressure of racing to accomplish things without the wit to see if they were any good. He held his two hands steady as
he poured and mixed the molten streams, longing for the slow and careful scoring of the pages, the focused trimming of his quill. The time to settle and to think. In half an hour he’d mixed a bucketful and carried it back to the bench. There, he thought, setting it down. The bastard ought to be content.

  Gutenberg dipped in the ladle and splashed a test out on the stone. He pried the metal off and put it to his teeth, bit, and spat. “Good Christ,” he croaked, and thrust his tongue out, flecked with grayish crumbs. “What crap is this?” His face contorted as his hand flew out and knocked the basin over. A searing pain tore Peter’s hand; he screamed and flung it wildly to throw off the scalding ore that poured across it. Hans grabbed the flailing silvered glove and swiftly plunged it into the cooling bucket that stood ready by the forge. Peter was jerked along, twisting on his knees, aware of nothing but the ringing pain. The old smith held his whole arm under water, his own hands rapid as they shucked the now-cold metal from the puckered, raging skin.

  “Crap,” the master thundered on, as if he had not seen. “Tin, for the love of Christ,” he bellowed. “Not iron, imbecile.”

  Peter twisted up to look at him. His whole being burned with hate as much as pain. “Then label them, for God’s sake.” He pulled himself up with a monumental effort, lifting with his right arm the full bucket that contained his throbbing hand. At least it was his left.

  “You watch your mouth.” The master plainly did not care that he was hurt. Hans stepped between them and said, “Buzz off, Henne, if you want your metal.” Gutenberg stopped, grumbling; he snorted once and shook his head. If Hans could only bottle that; Peter nearly laughed despite the pain. How did he have the right to call him Henne, and even better, shut his trap? He looked at the old smith with new respect. “That tallow that you have,” growled Hans, and Peter gestured with his free hand toward his things hung on the peg.