Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  “Come,” he said, and drew her into the composing room. He reached into his case, into the majuscules, pulled out a letter A. Her mouth fell open as he put it in her hand.

  “It is a new, amazing way to write,” he whispered. “Each letter gets a film of ink, and then we press it on a page.”

  She stared dumbstruck down at the chunk of metal. “This isn’t writing.”

  “A kind of . . . artificial writing. Come.” He led her toward the hulking presses. Beneath the cloth a forme lay waiting, bound in its stiff block. “See how we tie them all together, into lines—” He ran a finger on the metal, bent to see which page. “The book of Exodus,” he told her proudly.

  Anna stood entirely rigid at his side. When he glanced up, he saw a look of fear, repulsion, in her dark and slanted eyes.

  “This isn’t writing,” she repeated. “Nor these books. This is a smithy, do not lie.”

  “I do not lie.”

  “Not now? When you have lied to me before?”

  He reached for her, but she stepped back and put her hands into her cloak.

  “I felt the same, when I first saw it,” he said softly—remembering how he prayed to Benedict of Nursia, whom God had charged to write His Word. But Anna was just shaking her small head, a look of horror in her eyes.

  He crossed the room and picked up a Donatus. “This was the first book that we made.” He gestured at the press. “And that will be the next.”

  She blanched. “You toy with me.”

  “I swear it by this scripture.”

  “Swear not on something you defile.” She looked wildly around the room, fixed on the little copy of the Bible, broken and dismembered on the master’s desk. Her hand flew to her mouth.

  “You do not even try to see,” said Peter fiercely.

  “I see enough. I see that you deny the very gifts He gave us.”

  Silently he begged her. But she was shaking now.

  “He did this.” Suddenly she whirled and advanced on him. “He did it, didn’t he? They say he is a hard and angry man.” She fingered the slim grammar Peter still held open, looked an instant at it, pushed the thing away.

  “We did it, all of us.”

  “Then it is truly some dark evil that has overcome you.” Anna crossed herself. And then she looked at him, her dark eyes narrow and her voice high. “Where are your hands? Your eyes? I thought we shared that touch, at least. Yet now you worship all that’s hard and cold and dark.” She shook her head. “As if the Lord could live inside a hunk of metal.”

  “Chalices are metal. And the altar and the figure on the cross.”

  “You take yourself for something you are not.”

  “It is the path,” he said, “to which I have been called.” His hands dropped to his sides.

  “You truly blaspheme then,” she said. “And I would leave this pit.”

  He raised a hand toward her, empty of words. His breath, his heart, his very being, seized. There was a dreadful silence. Then in that searing gap he heard, far off, the scraping of a door. A distant sound: it entered him and knocked and became known. The door onto the street, then footsteps, hard and brisk, across the courtyard. Anna’s face went pale. “He’ll have my head,” hissed Peter, throwing the cloth back on the press. He took her roughly by the arm and dragged her toward the windows. When there was no mistaking that sharp tread, he thrust the grammar in her hand and turned to face him.

  Gutenberg said nothing for a terrifying moment. He did not need to. His baleful eyes raked both their faces. “Could you not find a barn for fornication?” His voice was hateful. “Jesus, I should chop it off.” He took two steps and thrust his livid head toward Anna’s pale and frightened face. “And you, my girl, if you so much as breathe a word, I’ll have you thrashed.”

  She slipped beside and past him, nodding, hurried up the stairs. A flash of her green skirt was all that Peter saw before his arm was gripped as if by death’s own bony hand.

  “Give me the key.” His breath was vile. “You are confined from here on out. Thought you were gifted, eh? A special case?” He leered, lips twisted in a grimace. “You’re nothing but a scheming sack of shit. The key, now. Then you get to work.”

  What happened next is a white blur. Peter remembers only going to the forge. He sees his hands, carved marble, loading pans of ore into the fire. He pushed them deeply in the flames and thought, as he had not for many months, that it had not been God but Satan who had tempted him and raised him up and thrown him down to die. Injustice twisted in him as he reached his arm in, stirring, leaning in too far. The skin shone and the hairs began to curl. His hopes, too, were no more than flaking, whitened ash. This was not his calling, nor his path. Angrily he pulled the lead cakes from the forge, and in his wretchedness he lashed at them, began to bash his tongs into the cooling metal.

  The tongs bit deeply in the molten cakes, leaving clear impressions, deep and sharp as footprints in wet sand.

  Peter stared, and stared, and wiped his eyes, and stared some more. He stumbled to the casting bench, groped for a letter punch, a mallet. He held the punch against the still-warm metal, smote it once. It left a deep, sharp hollow of the letter, perfectly reversed. A letter B, as in Beatus: now a perfect, solid mold. He put his hand upon it, laughed a bit, then wept.

  All through that night he worked, cutting squares of metal alloy, some still warm and others in degrees of cooling. He tried them one by one, held fast inside a clamp, testing for the perfect density, resistance to the hammer’s blow. By morning he had made a small, square letter mold of cold, hard metal. A mold entirely crisp and fine, a deep impression that would hold its shape through many castings. He did not know it then, but in his wretchedness he’d found that new technique that would transform their work, which printers everywhere would use forever after. A faster way to cast their letters crisp and clean, repeatedly from metal matrices—no longer prisoners of crumbling clay or sand. It was their doing—Master Gutenberg’s, and Anna’s—though he never told them so.

  CHAPTER 10

  SPONHEIM ABBEY

  Winter 1485

  TRITHEMIUS stops Peter there. His voice breaks in, a little squeaky and excited. “You mean to say that it was you? Not Gutenberg? But you who made it work—invented this technique the same as it is used today?” He pitches toward Peter, his quill suspended, pointing like a hound.

  “Invention is a big word,” Peter says. A stab at immortality, which Gutenberg had never shied from using. His old apprentice nods. “But yes.” His voice is calm. “It’s fair to say I did invent a key part of the process.”

  He holds two fingers up to show the size of that small letter mold. “The matrix, which we struck with punches, that’s the name we gave it.”

  The abbot’s head is cocked, his forehead creased. “Yet we have not heard any of this until now.”

  “I did not shout it from the rooftops.” Peter smiles a private smile. He had preferred to show his mastery in every book he made; he’d kept his distance from the man who claimed it all and trapped him in his shadow. “The world went on, and then he died, and after that I saw no point in making claims.”

  The truth had slumbered his whole life, until this abbot in his cloister called. “But as you say, posterity deserves to know.” Peter clears his throat. He gives the facts, as clear as he can make them, so that this chronicler will set it all correctly down.

  “First Gutenberg devised the art of casting letters, using sand, then clay. But we had come, as I have said, to something of an impasse. By then we’d spent a fortune—four thousand guilders, I would guess—yet made hardly any progress, before I found that faster way of casting letters. Our Bible printing changed completely after that.”

  It was Peter’s hand that held the mallet. He alone who did it, no one else. And yet he sees now how Gutenberg propelled it, too. He was the kind of man who pushed until things gave, a brute who could extract from them more than they ever thought they had.

  That matrix redeemed hi
m, certainly. Peter can still hear the way the master crowed. Oh, he was pleased: he praised him loudly at the time, though not again—not at the end, when it truly counted.

  “How did it change things?” Trithemius inquires. He seems deflated in some way: he’s gathered back into himself, busy again with ink and quill.

  “It was a major step. From this we jumped right to the caster that a man held in his hand.”

  Trithemius just gives him a blank look.

  “The apparatus we designed to hold the mold, and cast a single letter at a time. This was the main advance that brought the art up to the stage that it is now.”

  They evolved it slowly, over time; he perfected it a few years later with the Frenchman, Jenson. The metal mold itself could just as easily have come from Hans, if Peter had not beaten him to it. None of it sprang to life full-blown. Yet what could a young monk know of the beauty of mechanics? How could a layman understand the many tiny, vital steps of true creation? Always they said: it was this man, or that man, this great visionary, that genius. Yet invention is a process, unpredictable and long. All Peter knows for certain is that each of them had been essential in some way.

  He remembers mainly now how stunned he felt that day. All he could see was Anna’s white, revolted face. Nor did his father see the benefit, at first. They could make more type, faster, Fust said: So what? They still couldn’t print the pages any faster.

  “That had occurred to me as well,” the abbot says.

  “Write down that Gutenberg’s true genius lay in ordering the work, in breaking down and rearranging all the pieces.” On that Shrove Tuesday, he clapped his hands and spun the whole thing magically around.

  “The costs were fixed. The only thing that we could do, he said, was boost the revenue. It struck him almost visibly—that we could easily print more.”

  “Ah.” Trithemius makes a note.

  That was when they increased the print run. They added five-and-forty copies more, most printed onto vellum. Fust was certain he could sell more lavish copies to the merchants at the northern fairs. What extra cost might be entailed in raw materials paled beside the sums those extra copies would bring in.

  “We settled on one hundred eighty, which—in theory at least—would right the ledger.” The printer shakes his head.

  “A lot of sacrificial calves,” the abbot murmurs.

  “Indeed.” Peter thinks of Abraham and Isaac. “One hundred seventy for every copy.”

  They gaze at one another for an instant. Peter sees the green fields of the Rhineland in that spring, the frisky gamboling of calves and lambs. With what excitement they had parted after Easter: Fust against the river swollen with the Alpine melt, to sell in Basel, Austria, Tirol—up to Bavaria, then across the Thuringian woods back home. He took a quire from each of the first Bible books to show in every city to the merchants and the Brudermeisters of the guilds—in every country castle to the princes, dukes and margraves. It was a risky move, but they had little choice. They needed the deposits that those buyers pledged.

  Rome was not built in just one day, and neither was that Bible. Each step was key, he thinks: a part of that long chain they forged together with enormous effort. The workshop and the crew, the master and apprentice. He feels the loss then, stirring in a dusty corner where he’d laid it long before.

  “The Sunday after that was Invocabit,” he tells the abbot quietly. “You needn’t write that down.”

  Trithemius smiles, and lifts his hands—a little raising of his palms that’s halfway in between a blessing and a clap.

  Invocabit me, et ego exaudium meum.

  He shall cry to me, and I shall hear him.

  That first Sunday of Lent, in the year of our Lord 1453, Peter had stood once more beneath St. Quintin’s vaulted nave. Johann Fust had asked him back and Peter had agreed; the painter’s daughter in her flight no longer stood between them.

  Cry to me. So spoke the Lord unto the Hebrew tribes. Cry to me, from your wilderness, your weariness: the day of your deliverance is at hand.

  The miracle was the multiplying, Peter thought—then and always. From the one loaf, many; from the two fish, enough to feed a multitude. The mystery of God came in through skin and hand and eyes: take this light, this bread, these words, and cast them wide. It filled the air, the ears, this sound now of the punches striking, platens crashing: ceaseless re-creation, over and over, world without end.

  NUMBERS

  CHAPTER 1

  RETRIBUTION

  [18 of 65 quires]

  July 1453

  THEY HEARD the bugles first, resounding in the hills, and then the great bell of St. Martin’s, striking without cease. A cry went up among the sentries at the Diether Gate. And only then did Gutenberg stand up, alert; the men threw down their tools. The Cobblers’ Lane was jammed with men and women clutching at their children, rushing toward the square. Hooves pounded down the lane that led toward the city center, clattering as they hit the cobbles.

  Into their hot and sleepy little city came the horsemen of the Holy See, their cornets sounding, reining in their prancing, foam-flecked mounts.

  “Christians, awake!” The herald strained, voice hoarse, lifting from his stirrups. “Be warned! His Holiness Pope Nicholas the Fifth sends dreadful tidings.

  “Rome of the East has fallen to the infidel.”

  The beggars squatting in the shadows threw their rags over their heads and started wailing. Women screamed; men blanched. And then there was a dreadful silence, punctuated only by the throbbing of the bells. In the crush of people—aproned, sweaty, staring, clutching hammers, brushes, knives—Peter saw his father, wrenched too from the Kaufhaus scales.

  “The guns of Satan fired without remorse or cease upon our brethren day and night.” The envoy raised his arm. “All are slaughtered or enslaved. Our brother Constantine is dead, his city desecrated. The holy church of Saint Sophia has become a mosque.”

  Rome of the East, Constantinople, the beacon of the Eastern Christian Church. Destroyed. In every stuttered mind, the prophecy of Daniel: The End Times come when new Rome falls.

  In stealth the Muslim Turks had struck, attacking in the darkness before dawn. They’d felled her mighty towers, burned and murdered, raped her women, altars, churches. Forty thousand people turned to meat, their corpses bobbing in the Sea of Marmara like melons in the Grand Canal. No siege and sack more terrible, not even those that had befallen Babylon, Jerusalem, or Troy.

  “We’ll have to fight.” Peter blurted it and turned. Gutenberg seemed not to hear. His eyes were locked on the herald, filled both with horror and a grudging awe.

  Mehmet II, the Ottomans’ young chieftain, with his lust for blood had caused huge cannons to be forged. They’d pounded at the city wall for weeks, those guns, that force of hell some twenty thousand strong. The largest bombard was as long as your Rhine ships, the envoy said, and gestured toward the waterline. Those few who managed to escape said that the very air was rent with flames.

  The master’s look was terrible, transparent. Peter read its meaning instantly. How had those heathen Turks forged such a hellish and immense thing? The wonder froze his mouth and left a flicker twisting in his eyes. What kind of mold, what metal mix, could forge a tube so huge a man could fit inside? When Gutenberg at last broke off his baleful stare, it was to look up at the great bell tolling in St. Martin’s steeple.

  At length they learned from those who’d fled to Patmos, Crete, and Venice, creeping broken in their caravels across the Middle Sea, of how the Muslims had turned Christian genius to their worst defeat. Hungarians it was, who traveled into Anatolia and cast that monster that the Turks called their Basilic – Christians like themselves, turned to heretics, who forged it for their mortal enemies deep inside a huge clay pit.

  God tests them, holds them to the fire. He roars instead of weeps at their stupidity and sins. Why else had Peter, on that very day, been setting up that very passage? He was on the fourth book of Moses, known as Numbers. This i
s the number of the children of Israel, of their army divided according to the houses of their kindreds and their troops, six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty. The Lord bid Moses take the tribes and number them and muster them into a mighty army.

  Peter turned to Mentelin. The shock in his green eyes was like a mirror of his own. Was this why God had given men these gifts? To put his creatures to a test He knew they’d fail? The sultan’s cannon proof that man’s techniques could serve the cause of evil just as easily as good?

  This happened on the twenty-ninth of May, although the news had only just reached Rome. The tiding reached the pope on the feast day of a local saint: Saint Maximinus of Trier, who once gave succor to Saint Paul, the patriarch of Constantinople. How scripture’s web did weave its dreadful meanings.

  All were punished. Their sins, their cravenness, their greed, were to be blotted, every sinner swept away. The world was changed. Peter felt it even then, the drop inside the gut, the wrenching as it all began to pivot. What he and Gutenberg and Fust, the workshop, lost that day was not of much account, compared to that terrible bloodbath on the Bosphorus. But still the sultan’s strike was the clear cause of all that followed.

  “They must be mad!” The master found his voice at last. “To strike like that!” He punched his fist toward the sky. In the dense crowd a man yelled out, “Strike back!” Another, then another, until it thickened to a chant: “Strike back! Strike back!”

  “God have mercy!” Gutenberg was shouting. “Strike them, push them back.”

  Mentelin and Peter stood dumbstruck, hearing the great roar of hate. There would be holy war: God save them all.

  The master did not monger war, more than the rest. Peter understands that now. Gutenberg just felt, like every Christian soul, profoundly wronged—attacked on his own soil. And yet that blow too struck a gong in him that rang an end to all that had been theretofore. The day they heard of Christendom’s defeat, Peter saw a side of Master Gutenberg he’d never seen before: the warrior, with a fey, unseemly lust for battle.