Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  Both of the partners were due back now any day. Peter paid the herdsman and watched his whittled staff and belted robe receding down the lane. He shook his head and looked up briefly at St. Martin’s red stone steeple. Who else? The chandler, papermaker, varnish man? He chuckled then and crossed himself and closed the little door cut in the portal. He had been warned.

  A few days later, Peter heard from his cousin Jakob that a merchant stopping at the Kaufhaus out of Erfurt had been asking awkward questions on the trading floor. His uncle sent his son to tell him, not a serving boy; Peter understood it was a warning. A year had passed since all the guilds had taken gold for silence, but patience had its limits.

  Jakob the younger was a thick man, dark-haired like his mother, not that quick. “There’s them that wager you are casting weapons,” he said. “They know they’re not to talk, but . . .” Up and down went his broad shoulders. “The point is that your ship is leaky—so my father says.”

  The Erfurt merchant had inquired if Fust was in the city, as he’d like to buy a book. They had been saved by a swift wagoneer who said he wasn’t—but his brother was Fust’s other half. He’d pointed the fellow to Jakob’s great fine house, built by their father right across from the cathedral. A lucky thing, Jakob the younger said, though Peter knew it was not simply luck. He wondered only how his uncle answered—if he’d impressed upon the man the need for some discretion, and if so, exactly how. They could not say the thing was secret, not from Dietrich—only whisper meaningfully that this technique was of such value, and so marvelous, that none should hear of it until the Book was done. Then he could brandish it as proudly as he pleased, one of the lucky few to hold one in his hands. That at any rate is how the printer would present the thing, if he were charged with sales—which, God be praised, he wasn’t. Why in the devil had his father stopped to show the quires in Erfurt, anyway? It was too close, thought Peter, and too thick with clergymen.

  That was the question Gutenberg put sharply to his father too, when in October they both returned home. They rattled in and overlapped just like those tin-plate skaters on the tower clock. Gutenberg was bright-eyed, rested, clean, as if he’d stopped quite close to Mainz the night before, in Eltville or at St. Viktor’s.

  “How much did you get done?” He threw his cloak off, thrusting it at Peter, then kept moving down the hall. Peter looked at Hans, who rolled his rheumy eyes; he tossed the cloak toward a chair, not caring if it fell. The man moved through the workshop room by room, touching things as if to leave his scent in every corner.

  “You might have told me I’d have visitors,” Peter told him. First there had been the creditor, and then a nosy merchant. Gutenberg went still, his dark eyes moving between Hans and Peter. “I’d be obliged next time,” his foreman said, “if you’d leave more than Lorenz’s jar.”

  “You’re worse than an old woman.” The master waved a hand peevishly. And then that hand crept up and started worrying the fringes of his beard.

  They both jumped to hear Fust’s voice a few hours later, greeting someone in the yard. Peter laid aside his composing stick and stood, but Gutenberg was faster, always; he’d already darted to the door. He grasped his partner by the arm and steered him back out into the fall sunlight. Peter watched the way he turned his back, as if the two of them were all that mattered, and the workshop simply ran itself. Silently he followed, pulling shut the door. He was taller than his father, nearly as tall as Gutenberg, and yet more muscled, stronger than the master now. He inserted himself between them.

  “You plunder my own household, I have heard,” Fust drily said. “Ten guilders here, ten guilders there.” He tipped his head in greeting at his son.

  “And you shoot off your mouth to merchants.”

  “There was a merchant here from Erfurt,” Peter clarified. “Inquiring after Fust’s new Bible.”

  His father’s lips pulled tight. “Damnation.”

  “I said you’d best take care in how you peddled it,” growled Gutenberg.

  “He used the word?” Fust turned to Peter. “He called it, actually, a Bible?” His eyes were troubled. Peter shrugged. “I wasn’t there. Your ‘fine new book,’ or something like it—Jakob knows, he spoke to him.”

  “God’s beard, Johann,” said Gutenberg. “We don’t need this.”

  “Don’t tell me what we need.” Now it was Fust who growled, his broad face flat, his eyes reduced to slits. “You need to get it finished.” He bent his head and dropped his voice. “That man from Avignon has disappeared. But not before he trained some others, I am told.” He looked up toward the workshop window. “You have to speed it up, now, get it moving.”

  “What others?” hissed Gutenberg.

  “What does it matter? Anybody, damn it, can’t you see how little time we have?” Fust’s voice rose and a flush began to spread up his thick neck. “The longer you drag on, the likelier it is that someone else will get there first.” He turned to Peter. “What is the holdup? Tell me that.”

  “There is no holdup,” Peter answered. A man like Fust could never understand the sheer backbreaking labor of it. “I drive them harder than is human.”

  “Unless you want to build another press and hire more hands,” said Gutenberg. He glanced at Peter, just the barest flicker that went back and forth between them: Lord, these moneymen. “Which I don’t guess you do. If I were you, Johann, I’d go home and relax.”

  “Relax?” Fust’s face contorted. “How should I, when you bleed me dry—with not a blessed thing to show for it? Your bloody needs are endless.”

  “We only said that Erfurt is too close,” said Peter.

  “You think that I don’t know?” His father turned on him. “I don’t see guilders raining from the heavens, though, now do I?”

  “It wouldn’t cost so much if we weren’t forced to pay for all the bleeding widows.” Gutenberg cocked one eyebrow. “You know I never saw the gain from drawing in the guilds.”

  “Water under the bridge,” snapped Fust.

  “It can’t be run in drips, like piss. We need more, yes—but not like this.”

  “You got deposits on a third, or even half.” His father’s eyes blazed. “That isn’t piss.”

  Ten guilders down on every paper copy, twenty on the vellum; swiftly Peter reckoned. Deposits on a third of the edition came to seven hundred fifty guilders—if Fust had managed to sell half, they’d banked at least a thousand.

  “It goes like shit through a goose. Ink and gullets, coal and candles.” The master lifted up one corner of his mouth. “You still owe me for this last half year, in fact.”

  Fust shook his head and muttered to his son instead: “Then show me where we are.”

  Peter walked him through the shop and showed him their position on the chart. “Not even halfway,” said his father. His whole body seemed to sag.

  “Next time we talk, I want to see your ledgers,” he told his partner as he left.

  Sardonically, the master touched a finger to his temple and bowed down.

  CHAPTER 4

  BITTER WATER

  [31.5 quires of 65]

  8 November 1453

  AND YET the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

  His father had departed one last time before the winter, toward the north; the master too was off “prospecting,” as he called it. The six compositors were seated quietly setting type that wet November afternoon. A paperboy came running down the hall and said there was a dreadful banging. One look at that white face and Peter knew. “It’s Mistress Grede,” the girl gasped. “Hannah says that you’re to fetch the midwife, quick.”

  Peter grabbed a boy to send a note. “Her name’s Maria Lambeth, in the lane behind St. John the Baptist. You know it?” The dazed boy nodded. Peter scratched some words on two small sheets. “Then take the other to my aunt, Frau Fust, the Kaisersberg. Hurry! Go!”

  Hans told him: “You go, too.”

  The terror in his heart erased all sight of the familiar lanes and houses. Al
l Peter saw was that girl’s white, white face—and then the housekeeper’s, all chalky too, her fist against her mouth.

  “What is it?” he demanded as he leapt the stairs.

  “She’s bleeding, sir.”

  The chamber door stood open and the cook was bent above the bed. Grede lay among the bedclothes, skin the same bleached linen white, her eyes glazed wide.

  The bed was filled with blood, her body from the hips down wrapped in rags that blotted crimson just as fast as the cook could wind them. Peter raised a hand to shield the sight. Grede reached for it, and he could only clutch her hand the way the terror clutched his heart. Dear God, he prayed. There was so much blood.

  “The midwife’s coming,” he said. The cook just nodded, lips compressed.

  “I don’t want to die.” Grede’s voice was twisted, trembling, then it dropped, subsiding with her strength. She fell back on the bed.

  “Hush, don’t say such things.” He stroked her slick white forehead. “Think of your life. Your strong and healthy babes.”

  Her face crumpled, and she turned from him and wept.

  “I bathed,” she blurted frantically. “Oh God, dear God.” Her eyes flew open, hard now, bright as flints. “What have I done, why does He punish me?” Her hand flew to her mouth.

  The cook wrung out a cloth and placed it on her brow, and gave him a swift warning look. Where was the midwife, where his aunt? Oh, Grede. What did he know of women, or of bearing children? The pains she felt were deeper than a man could guess.

  “Don’t take my child,” she begged the Lord as that bright blood ebbed from her womb. And yet the patron saint withdrew her grace that day. There shall not be one fruitless nor barren in thy land. The empty promises of Exodus.

  Much later she would say to him that she, and her poor babe, had paid for all the rest of them. Like downy chicks, the first to feel an ill wind’s ill effects. It was the hatred and despair, she said, that swirled like noxious fumes across the empire and the city in those days—if not yet through their workshop.

  The women came at last, with herbs and boiling water: Lambeth with her surgeon’s hands and Aunt Elisabeth. Grede squeezed his hand and let her head fall back on to the pillow. “Fetch Johann,” she rasped.

  He sent a message with the traders’ fastest rider, and returned to take up vigil on the stairs. He prayed to God, in humbleness, to save her—to keep her life, and take the child’s. As his blood father, in his time—he realized with savage insight—most certainly had done. He bowed his head, beseeching.

  What right, what birthright, had a man? What good were his books and tools, the business of his hands? Peter felt his heart cleave as he paced, hearing nothing but the women’s murmurs and the clanking of the pans.

  It came to him with certainty: the higher they reached toward heaven’s stars, the farther their feet lifted from God’s earth.

  The door swung open finally. The midwife, in a bloody apron, stood a moment to collect herself. She closed her eyes, and opened them, and put a hand out on his arm.

  “She’ll live,” she said. “But God has taken back the child.”

  He heard his old friend weeping, cries to rend the world, behind the heavy wooden door. He moved to go to her, but when he did, the midwife gripped him all the tighter.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” she said, “but leave her to grieve.”

  There’d be no public mourning for the unborn babe. Fust held that something few had known should be lamented in the privacy of home. Perhaps he felt too great a show of feeling would diminish him somehow. It was hard to know. All Peter knew was that he’d never heard a woman tear into a man the way Grede did when Fust refused to let her hang the mourning wreaths. She dressed in black from that day on regardless. She knelt for hours at St. Quintin’s in bleakest penance, bludgeoned by the thought of that small, unbaptized soul alone in limbo. The sorrow spread, unnamed, through the timbers of the Haus zur Rosau.

  Men weep behind a mask, as he well knew. That year he watched his father’s belt grow slack, what hair remained go purely white. Gone was the paunch, the ready smile, the ornamented jacquards: in their place emerged a stranger, hollow-eyed and somber, hand lifted to the heavy crucifix he wore now at his neck.

  It wasn’t just this one cruel loss. It was all of a piece, it seemed to Peter: the drying up of trade, the weight of all that Bible debt, the certainty of holy war. The papal bull was tacked up on St. Martin’s portal: the pope required all able-bodied men to muster for Crusade. No soul could hope to be exempt; any who hesitated would be jailed and excommunicated.

  Yet Fust had taken this news too with apathy—as he took everything in those dark days. He hardly stirred outside the Kaufhaus, and did not even come to check their progress at the shop. Although it stung him, Peter did his best to understand. His father had buried a child and wife before, and bowed before God’s will—then God had smiled, and brought him Grede and Tina, little Hans. Why then did this loss, after those others, hold such lethal force?

  Old Lothar turned to Peter finally, and said his father barely slept, or ate. “Reason with him if you would, young master.” He shook his rutted, faithful head. Peter begged his father to remember that the Lord had spared his wife. She would come back; the only balm for certain wounds was time.

  “Don’t speak to me of grace,” was all Fust answered.

  The fear of losing her, of losing all—his business, and his books, the freedom of the open road—had wormed its way into his heart. It was as if everything he’d built, and all he’d reached for, was suddenly fragile and in danger of collapse. Always before there’d been an order and a sense, but now the sultan’s hand had throttled his whole livelihood, and God himself had turned His back.

  CHAPTER 5

  ILLUMINATION

  [34.5 quires of 65]

  Late November 1453

  A PAINTER CAME to Mainz that bleak November, traveling as those roving brush-men did from Residenz to monastery, patrician home to ducal hearth. The penning of new manuscripts and painting of their margins still went on, of course. This man, an Austrian, lodged with the painter Pinzler on the Leichhof, Peter heard. Apparently he hoped to get some painting work on the new Bible being written by the monks at St. Viktor’s.

  And in the Humbrechthof they had at last hit the halfway mark. They were not far off now from Psalms, which Gutenberg had chosen as the end of the first volume. The text was far too massive to bind in one book; they’d split it into two. So it was time, thought Peter, going to his father and saying it out loud: time now to think about illumination of the copies Fust had planned.

  Right at the start, his father told them he had seen it in a dream. He saw a row of printed pages on a trestle, then a brush—a painter coloring a dozen copies with the selfsame leaves, the same bright birds and flowers. Just as Gutenberg had made the text identical, Fust would hire a painter who would decorate the Bible with identical motifs. A few to start, to see how they would sell—then more, if the new men of means were pleased to buy a book complete and ready-made.

  The beauty of illumination, if nothing else, had always worked a certain magic in his father’s heart. Peter prayed it might again have this effect. This painter was in competition with the local artists from the Cherry Orchard workshop run by Weydenbach, he said; it was a perfect chance to view the two contrasting styles. Fust, haggard, old now, simply shrugged. He had no interest in the local style. “Though it is plain enough,” he dully added, “whom you would have me hire.”

  Pinzler’s sons, Anna’s brothers, worked in that local workshop. Peter saw her jars of unguents and glues, the little curtain to the kitchen and her mother’s loom. “Not necessarily.” He shut the door inside his mind. “It’s up to you.

  “Indulge me,” he went on, cajoling. “Let Klaus arrange a viewing.”

  Fust cocked his head. Thinner, he resembled Jakob, with his wary and pugnacious look. “So long as Gutenberg is not invited.”

  Peter looked at him intently.
“I shouldn’t think it would be necessary.”

  Fust pursed his lips and nodded. It still rankled, the words they’d had, the costs of that third press, the four new workers—but most of all it was the fear, which Peter shared: the sense that everything now dangled by the slimmest thread.

  “A little air,” he said, and gently touched Fust’s elbow. “A little brushwork will do wonders.”

  Peter sent a note to Pinzler to arrange it. There might be something in it for the painter too, he wrote. What the man might think of him did not disturb his mind. Nine months ago he’d almost been betrothed—now he was not. The Lord of Hosts determined all: no part of it was really in their human hands. The Book just ran and ran into a smoky distance, dragging him behind it, and the crew. A week before, Mentelin had finished the last pages of Isaiah, the Salvation book. Repent, or face destruction, was its cry. Those without faith will not endure. Peter’s only mission was the driving and the steering of this pounding team: three presses and six setters, trampling through the sinning, bloodstained world. Making the highway straight, he said inside himself: the highway of the Lord.

  The Austrian was slight and weather-bitten, with one squinting eye. Klaus Pinzler clasped Fust’s hand and led them to the table, cleared and pushed up to the fire. Markus, Anna’s brother, had her nut-brown hair and a look of cautious query in his eyes. Beside him, she stood. Anna. She looked older. How long, one year—two?—since he had come here that first time? How was it he had come again, what was the Lord’s intent? All things have their season, Peter thought: A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.