Fust had a bottle in his hand; he twisted at the cork until it popped.
The pressure gave then, too, in Peter’s head: he heard the platens of a hundred presses crashing, books churned out as hot and rough as bolts bashed out by blacksmiths. Big volumes too, not puny little grammars: vast quantities of brutish, ugly, soulless tomes.
He scrutinized Fust’s face: his blue eyes shone, his cheeks were glowing. Did he feel no compunction about selling out that beauty, all the praise and grace that God invested in their hands? He glanced at Konrad, who had lately started muttering that he would like to push on home. Keffer would be glad, he guessed, of extra work. Hans—well, Hans was as loyal as a hound. Which left just Peter Schoeffer to spit in the soup.
“There is a reason books like these are done by scribes.” He reached and took it out of Konrad’s hands. “You need at least two separate scripts, at least two sizes.”
Gutenberg’s glass stopped, half raised. “Really.” He cocked an eyebrow, looked around, and drawled it mockingly. “I’m much obliged. I guess then Brack is short of scribes.”
“Heinrich Brack,” Fust put in, looking hard at Peter. “The prior of St. Jakob’s.”
“And author of our text.” The master wheeled, gave Hans a jovial whack. “His Grace is more than pleased. You should have heard old Rosenberg!” He cackled. “‘Such a means to make a perfect text, and in his Lordship’s diocese!’” He mimed a high falsetto.
“I guess he didn’t look that closely at the type then,” Peter said grimly. He saw again that cheap Donatus, open on Archbishop Dietrich’s knee.
“I guess he did.” The master’s back was up; his eyes were glinting.
“With due respect.” Peter glanced apologetically at Hans. “This letter will not do.”
“Says who?” The master’s face was twisted.
“It is too coarse.” Peter spoke as pleasantly as he was able. “Too heavy, and too square.”
“You, of course, could do much better.”
“That’s not my meaning.”
“Although . . .” Fust’s voice broke in, meditative and slightly probing. “It might not be a bad idea. It might just—”
Peter, stunned, could only gape.
“A finer letter, as he says, might well improve it.” Fust fished out his spectacles and reached to scan the written missal.
“A whole new face—that takes six months—to draw and cut and cast?” The master barked a laugh. “God’s body, man. It’s madness.”
Fust stroked his chin, and held his ground. “Even so. It’s worth a try.”
Konrad looked at Peter and traced a blade across his neck; Hans thrust his lips out, sighing. The master turned his back and walked a moment up and down, one hand inside his vest, the other torturing his beard. “Two hands and in two sizes,” he muttered blackly, spun, and then returned. He brought his face so close that Peter saw the tiny red threads in his eyes. “You’re not the only one who’s ever seen a missal, Master Scribe.”
“Let it be on my head,” said Fust in a loud voice. Unspoken, his real meaning: it is my money, sir, and I decide.
“So be it, then. The purse prevails. But let me warn you.” Gutenberg recoiled from him, still holding Peter in the tight grip of his eyes. “The thing had better blind me with its brilliance.”
What kind of man was this? What kind of stunted and inhuman being, to whom Peter had been yoked? For all the years he worked with him, he tried to understand. The truth was that he never really knew. Peter came as close as anyone: he’d seen the master’s childlike wonder and delight, and then the darkness that erupted, demons lurking just beneath the surface every time. He was a man who made the weather. He was as changeable and dramatic as the Rhineland sky: sunny and expansive at one moment, black and pelting hail the next.
It seemed to Peter then that each of them contained his separate humor. Gutenberg was choleric, all fire and passion. Fust was sanguine, full of appetite. The Roman doctor Galen would have classified Peter himself as phlegmatic, as cool as air or water. The colors of their humors thus were black and red and white. But most of all it was the black of choler that prevailed.
That afternoon they were allowed to venture out. Hans had wangled it, somehow. If Gutenberg had had his way, they would have started on that missal then and there. Instead the master shut himself up in his study, and the crew received a sharp and sunny winter afternoon. They ambled to the Iron Market at the river’s edge, where Konrad made a beeline for the locks. He needed something small, to fit a chest.
The Mainzers, when they saw them, eyed them with suspicion. The story had circulated that these strangers made some trinkets for the pilgrim trade, which almost certainly would cut into business. Peter’s uncle had made clear that the goldsmiths’ guild would tolerate this cockeyed workshop just so far. Peter wondered how long Fust and Gutenberg could keep up this pretense. At least the priests and scribes of Mainz were far too fine to venture down along the docks—but just in case, he kept his cap pulled down.
The market overflowed with every metal object men could fashion, laid out on cloth or spilled from baskets: buckles and rings and hooks, tin plates and pans and candlesticks, brass salvers shaped like fish. The locks were sent from Nuremberg, whose smiths were known for their precision and their patience. Konrad fingered every shape and size on offer. None could touch the Nurembergers for a lock, or cogs or wheels and balanced shafts that ran the vital works of scales and clocks. He demonstrated how the tumbler dropped to lift the barrel. “As tough to crack as Keffer’s balls.” The pressman laughed. The big smith grinned to hear his name. “In point of fact.” He elbowed Peter, jerked his head toward the public baths.
“Another time,” Peter said, and pushed him playfully away. His head was ringing still with this fresh madness.
“You then,” Keffer said, and Konrad nodded, paying for and pocketing his lock. Hans made a face as they went off. “One thing on his mind, that lad,” he said, watching as they shouldered through the crowd.
Hans and Peter moved on southward on the empty towpath. The city had been cut off for four whole months. The market boats had drastically reduced their traffic, waiting for the haul downriver in Cologne, then linking in a long towline that only stopped to switch the teams in Mainz. The wind was all that now alighted in that excommunicated place; Peter walked against it, the folly of the morning turning in his mind. Hans plodded at his side; he’d never broach the topic. They crossed the frozen rill that cut the city from the quays of Selenhofen, where a huge new ship was being built. Workers swarmed its frame. Peter’s eyes rose above the busy scene and picked out the long row of roofs that was the Charterhouse, stretched like the beads of a great rosary along the bank. Inside each small peaked cell a monk sat writing, with his quire of parchment and his scripture and his quills.
“They’re mad.” It burst out of him. “Right off their heads, to think that we can do this.”
“Damn right.” Hans laughed. “Else none of us would be here.”
“Ten thousand letters, Hans. It can’t be done, not stroke by stroke.”
“You should have kept your trap shut, then.” Hans scanned the vacant shore, then squatted down and plucked a piece of reed. “Eight months, I reckon, give or take.”
“Monstrous.” Peter looked downriver, far away.
“You, a man of doubt?”
“Completely.” He dropped his cloak and sat.
Hans was fishing in his teeth with the thin reed. His eyes held Peter’s, weighing. “But we can’t use the one we’ve got.”
“I didn’t mean–”
Hans flapped his hand. “He doesn’t give a damn how it is done, so long as it gets done.”
“He’ll kill us all.”
“Well, I’m still standing,” Hans said, and stood, spat out the chewed stalk. He held a hand out and hauled Peter up.
“He doesn’t have a clue.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Hans scratched his grizzled beard and looked
across the river toward the distant fields. “He knows damn well. He isn’t going to get another chance.” He pursed his lips. “He’ll have to throw it in, if it don’t work this time. And that would fair near kill him.”
“There’s nothing that could kill that man.”
“You’d be surprised. We’re not as young as we once were.” Hans pulled his cloak up higher on his neck. With his bare pate, his ring of hair, he might have been a barefoot friar. They walked on, came up to a rope that cordoned off the boat works.
“Quite a monster.” Hans whistled. “Windows out of glass.”
Though raw and keeled onto its side, the ship recalled to Peter Mainz as she had been. The hull was that of any Overlander, lifting high above the water, flat of keel to skim the river’s shifting sandbars. When it was sent downstream for painting, it would bear the Katzenelnbogen coat of arms—and quantities of tax-free fish and salt and wine the council had allowed, to sway the duke in their dispute with the archbishop.
“You people like ’em big,” Hans went on. “Burgundy’s not half so grand.”
Peter looked at him, surprised. “The Katzenelnbogens hold the toll,” he answered. “Downriver at Saint Goar.”
“Thieves. They’d melt the gilding off their fathers’ coffins.”
Peter laughed. “You’ve worked for nobles, then?”
“My old man’s shop hung on the Strassburg bishop’s orders.” Hans looked slyly at him. “I’ve seen my share, believe me too, with Henne.” He screwed his eyes up. “Nasty brutes, the lot. Always grinding at the prices, pitting brother against brother in the guild.” It was a speech, for Hans.
“I heard the master was a member there.”
Hans grinned. “He couldn’t carve to save his life. But he was damn sure tickled to be asked.” Hans turned, and as he did, whacked Peter on the back. “If it makes you any gladder, he’s as rude to all them high-and-mighties as he is to you.”
They walked back across the stream that cut the fishing village from the city proper. They’d almost reached the lower Rackgate when they heard the bell: a deep, commanding boom. The tower of St. Martin’s. Peter had not heard or felt that sound in years. The rumble of it tolled his very bones. Before they’d crossed the span and made their way inside, another bell rang, higher by an octave, and then a third: St. Stephan’s, St. Quintin’s. The voices of the churches opened one by one and swelled into a giddy chorus.
They made their way along the streets, filled suddenly with people rushing out. Strangers fell on strangers, hugging, laughing; Peter felt his own throat fill. The ban was lifted—there could be no doubt. The clamor of the bells drowned out all other sound. As Heilant had predicted, peace in time for Christmastide: Dietrich had released his fist. The crowd surged blindly, bearing them like sticks toward the marketplace and the cathedral. St. Martin’s doors were now flung wide. But at what price? Peter had the time to wonder, as the tide tossed them like dazed survivors at the Golden Mallet—where for once they entered undetected, raised their mugs, and drank to golden Mainz among their fellows.
CHAPTER 8
MAINZ
January–May 1451
HE’D WORKED the calculus of duty in his head. Peter owed an alphabet of lead, no more. What they would do with this new letter mattered little to him as he pictured the great chancelleries in which he’d find a place. There was no further talk from Fust of marriage contracts; Peter guessed his father knew that he might bolt if pushed. Gutenberg meanwhile procured a missal book that he dismembered, fanning out the pages on his desk. Sacks of ore appeared, a bale of paper half as tall as Hans. Konrad hammered a new casting box, and Peter took a spot beneath the window frame and started tracing.
For all that he despised this art as crude, it was not in his nature to draw badly. The paper that he used was of pure linen, free of imperfections, to avoid the slightest wobble in the lines that he would transfer onto metal punches. The alphabet he planned must be as fine as any he had drawn, to sing the psalms and say the words of the apostles. He traced and retraced each line, swash, and spur, and spaced the letters widely on the large white sheet. Each time the bell struck one more hour he rose and stretched his arms and thawed his fingers at the forge. Hans, peering over his right shoulder, bellyached that all those fine connecting lines would drive them blind. The master and his father hovered too, until Peter brusquely said he couldn’t concentrate with them both breathing down his neck.
It took him three full weeks to draw the letters to his satisfaction. He made them larger, blacker, tighter than the letters of the grammar: written closely, they resembled a thick mat of woven thorns. He could not do it any faster. He understood by then that every single one would be the progenitor of all the hundreds, even thousands, they would cast precisely in its image. He drew full letters in two sizes, majuscules and minuscules, ligatures, abbreviations; each size required two hundred different hunks of type. Hans and Keffer looked like cattle stunned before the kill when they considered how long it would take to carve and cast those alphabets.
“I’ll pray for you,” said Peter with a little smile, touching one stiff finger to the cap he wore to keep the hair out of his eyes. When he was done, he left the finished sheets for Gutenberg in a clean pile.
He didn’t want to care, and yet he did. He came in the next day both wary and expectant. The master was already sitting at his desk.
“I might have known you’d bankrupt us,” he started. The flame lit only half his face; he wore a pair of lenses on the bridge of his long nose. “You’d have us slave a year, I guess, to cut these?” The words were as caustic as ever, yet there was something different in his tone. He lifted up one sheet and scrutinized it, and turned to Peter standing there. Gutenberg’s apprentice saw the flicker of a smile. “It’s strong, though. Black. And still with a slight feeling of the hand.”
“It is compressed, compared to many.”
“So then it saves on parchment.” The master grinned and handed all the pages back.
Hans showed Peter how to forge the brass in rods they clipped and hammered to a square-tipped shaft. They made hundreds of these golden wands, which they then carved. Peter watched the old smith hunker at the bench, the shaft clamped in a vise, a little square of paper with the first of all those letters in his hand. Hans let a drop of flax oil fall onto the paper, watched it go translucent as the ink began to shine, then flipped it. The letter was as perfectly reversed as if they viewed it in a mirror. He laid the letter on the metal tip and rubbed it softly with his finger: the inky shape lay on the brass now in reverse, and ready to be carved.
The goldsmith fingered through his chisels for a tiny blade no thicker than an awl. “Pray for us,” he said, with a bare smile, and screwed a glass into his eye. It was an old, familiar sight: the craftsman bent, absorbed, his eyes and fingers joined in one exacting act, the world shrunk to a space no larger than his touch and breath.
When it was Peter’s turn to try, he stretched his neck and arms and emptied out his mind. He grasped the chisel—like the quill, it was a pure extension of his hand. The metal peeled like shavings of cold butter from his blade. He tapped, and watched it flake, moved down a hair and tapped again and blew the shining shards away. Hans said that metal had a grain, like wood; you had to learn to know the way it gave. The letter was the simplest stroke, an l. Peter tapped and flaked and blew. Deeper, Hans said. Straighter. There. An hour, then two. And then the slanted cap atop the stroke, the angled basin of its heel. Hans handed him a brush, an even smaller awl. Peter felt a stinging in his eyes; he wiped the sweat off, bent back down.
Scribes often noted in the edges of their manuscripts the ways they suffered in the handiwork of God. A sharp complaint, secreted in a margin: Thin ink, may night fall soon. I’ve finished now. For Christ’s sake, bring me drink. Writing caved the ribs and torqued the back and fogged the eyes. Once in Saint-Victor’s library in Paris Peter had discovered a whole string of notes from the same scribe: This parchment is certainly hairy, he
had carped, this lamp gives a bad light. And yet until he bent for hours above that shaft of metal, Peter never really understood his closing thought: Just as the sailor yearns for port, the writer longs for the last line.
At last he straightened, stretched his aching neck, and reached the finished punch toward Hans. The smith turned toward a candle, held the tip above the flame, rotating it until the whole was covered in a film of soot. “Smoke proof,” he grunted, pressing it onto the paper. And then they saw where it was wrong, where right; they placed the punch back in the vise, and sliced minutely at it one more time.
The work of the apprentice is the taming of all impulse: in place of pride, humility; impatience mastered, then subdued. It took Peter back to his first weeks at the scriptorium, where Anselm started by removing feathers, vellum, leather pouches, ornament of every kind. He stripped the pupils down to one thin reed, a lump of lampblack, one plain sheet. To learn the silencing of will, of the murky self: to strip their bodies and their minds to the essential. Apprenticeship, he said, was patience, and a deep, abiding faith: again, again, and yet again, until the hand was firm, the soul scoured clean. For only then would they be purely Adam’s flesh, a conduit, a channel.
Hans told him that he had “the feel.” The way that he touched Peter’s elbow, took his proofs out to the light, and traced his horny nails around each contour was a sign of his regard. He grumbled out of habit when the “scribbler” wasn’t satisfied. “Feinschmeckery,” he’d mutter. Fussbudgetry. Yet Peter noticed how he started taking just that bit more care at his own carving, holding his own work to that same “fancy” standard.
As fast as they were finished with each punch, the others took them to make molds and started casting: not just Keffer and Konrad but the master as well. Through that dark Lenten season Gutenberg too rolled up his sleeves. It wasn’t, Peter thought, that he was suddenly awash with fellow feeling. The truth was that the man could not sit still.
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