He paused a moment, undecided. They might have taken him to the archbishop, yet he had heard no haste of hoofbeats heading north, toward the river ford that led to Eltville or Aschaffenburg. To Dietrich’s residence in Mainz, then: there were cells inside the Little Court, he knew, to hold the miscreants before the court of law, beside those gardens where his peacocks screamed.
The square before St. Martin’s glowed as if each crystal of the snow was lit up from within. Out of the ragged clouds a strange and diffuse brightness came, from hidden moon and stars. The traders had all shuttered and deserted their locked stalls. Peter headed toward the ghostly pillars of the Little Court. He cursed with renewed vigor as the snow soaked through the flimsy leather of his shoes, and wished belatedly he’d brought his boots—and then his torch and knife. For halfway there he saw a movement in the shadows, a flickering; he stopped and peered across the shifting pools of dark and light. This was no time for fingers, murderous or larcenous, around his throat. He sidled silently into the deeper darkness at the edges cast by the great houses. A figure peeled then from the cloister columns, walking slowly toward him from the gate of Dietrich’s palace. Tall and hooded, stalking almost, rustling as its arms swung, punching at the air. Another step, and Peter knew: he heard the muttering beneath the breath, the churning of the consonants, a bitter jumbling like letters clacking to the ground. The bastard’s teeth were doubtless ground as well, absent a bone to chew, a body he might lash with that abusive bludgeon in his mouth.
Gutenberg plowed toward him, head bent, face entirely shrouded by the hood, venting like Vesuvius. Unseeing, wrapped in his own drama; Peter moved out from the shadows in his path. If he had had a dagger he might well have closed his hand around the clean hard purpose of its hilt. Instead he bared his teeth and let the words fall with contempt upon the snow.
“They let you go.”
The head jerked up; the eyes blazed as the hood fell back. His master—once his mentor and his father, in loco parentis—stared right through him, gave a short, hoarse laugh.
“Out of my way,” he said, with such a weight of venom in his voice that Peter for an instant faltered.
“No.” Gathered himself, and stepped a pace toward him. “Not after this.”
“Don’t even dare.” Glittering, entirely foreign to him, furious. The voice was little better than a growl. “I’m sick to death of interference.” He made a swipe with one long arm, as if to push his foreman from his path.
“Out of my way, I tell you. I will not be stopped.”
He was wild, inhuman. Horned and dangerous, head down, goring all that stood before him. It ended there, in Peter Schoeffer’s heart. Regard, the joy he’d mirrored, common cause. He felt his hands drop to his side, those hands he’d raised in some vain gesture of defense. He could not trust him, ever, not to trample everything he held most sacred in this life. Gutenberg just switched his cloak and glowered, passing with a jerk to his left side—the way the sailors on the Rhine since time began had dodged the Lorelei.
CHAPTER 7
SPONHEIM ABBEY
Winter 1485
FROM THAT POINT ON I knew—he was a danger to the Book.”
“You can’t mean that.” Trithemius draws back, his look reproving.
“A liability, of that I had no doubt.”
The dream Peter is spinning ruptures with these words. For hours the abbot has said nothing. From time to time he’s bent to scratch a note, attentive as a scribe should be, entirely silent—loath, perhaps to break the flow. Until he flinches, hearing those harsh words.
“This is a weighty charge.”
“He was a risk. I know it sounds . . . ungrateful. But after such a stunt, how in God’s name was I—was anyone—to trust him?”
In truth, the master never really trusted Peter or his father, not entirely. He took no man into his confidence; he felt the rules did not apply to him.
For a long moment no one speaks. The room is a suspended bell of wood, outside of which the world is white. They’ve sat companionably as fall has turned to snow and ice, thinks Peter, each one of his long visits a tick warmer until this.
Trithemius cinches at the cord that girds his habit. “I am reminded,” he says, in the slightly pompous tone he saves for chapel, “of what the angel said to Ezra.” He folds his hands into a point beneath his spadelike nose.
“Do you recall? How Uriel asked Ezra who could ‘Weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me back the day that is past’?”
He drops his hands. “The answer is that no man can. That is the meaning of the riddle. If we can’t even grasp such things, how can we comprehend the ways of the Most High?”
There is a light in him, the light of new conversion. He’s only been a monk two years, an abbot even less.
“Thus we can never say how any of our actions fit His plan. Not mine, not yours—not even Gutenberg’s.”
Peter’s estimation of the fellow rises. He’d thought the abbot driven mainly by ambition, but this steeliness reveals a deeper side. The printer pours himself a glass of the weak red they make on the Mosel.
“Ezra,” he says, meditatively. “I remember thinking as it went to press that Ezra’s howl was like our own. Incomprehension, rage at the destruction of Jerusalem—just as we felt to know the heathen had destroyed Constantinople.” Strange and riddling books they were, that prophet’s, filled with visions of apocalypse. The question Ezra posed as painful still as when he’d posed it fifteen centuries before: How, Lord, are we to understand your cruel destruction of your chosen people?
“But I remember thinking, too”—Peter holds the abbot firmly with his eyes—“that Ezra held the seed as well for understanding the Lord’s purpose with our Bible.”
Trithemius lifts one nearly hairless eyebrow. “Go on.”
“He tells us, does he not, that all this present suffering is just prelude? ‘For did not the souls of the just in the cellars ask . . . when shall the fruit come of the floor of our reward?’ And the angel answered, ‘When the number of the seeds in you shall be filled, because he has weighed the world in a balance.’”
Peter waits, expectantly. Surely, if the man is quick, the meaning’s clear. And yet the abbot’s face does not uncloud.
“The numbers of the just and righteous seeds must swell—to overwhelm that evil.” He leans to drive it home. “The Word must spread. There was no greater way to swell their ranks, it seemed to me, than by the printing of this Bible.
“And so, it followed, any interference was transgression of God’s will.”
Trithemius has told him he has Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; he studied at the university in Heidelberg. He’s keen to shake this abbey up and raise again the Benedictine lamp of learning. Yet he is smug as well, a bit too satisfied with his own rise. Peter sees him smile, as if to say I’ve got you now.
“And yet,”—the abbot spreads his hands—“is it not telling that your former master too spread prophecy? It is a fundamental feature of the scriptures that what is meant is hidden. The truth is only shown to those disciples that He trusted.” He waits for Peter’s nod. “There is no doubt that it was willed—the printing of it, even your archbishop’s efforts to prevent it. For after all, you must admit: you did succeed. The Book was made. The Bible, for your master’s sins, was never thwarted.”
He settles back, pleased with his argument.
“Success,” says Peter. The word is bitter on his lips.
Was he the only one who saw? The only one who understood what had been lost in the collapse of that first, extraordinary workshop? Anger flares, as bright and hot as years before, to think of all the books that had not been, the masterpieces they would certainly have made, if Gutenberg had not destroyed that brotherhood.
“The Book was plucked out of the flames. Nothing remained of all we might have done, the greatness that I thought we might achieve.”
The young man laughs. “You speak as if you had a say in how the world
unfolds.”
“But Saint Mark says too that man has his role. ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight his paths.’” He thinks of Mentelin, setting Isaiah all those years ago: Make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God.
Trithemius blinks. “Of course.” He nods. “The Lord does act through us.”
“We’re not just senseless tools.” The printer scowls. “You must have read the teachings of Saint Hugh.” How lifted he had been, at this pup’s age, to think that God resided in each particle of the created world—and thus in Peter, too.
“I have. Although . . .” The young man flails, and Peter senses how he calculates. He’s thinking that he’d best not stop the printer now, before he’s got the story safely down. “It seems presumptuous, that’s all,” he shrugs, “to think that we complete His tasks.”
Complete—or start—or carry on: the master would have said that he’d been chosen from the instant he arrived in this harsh world.
“My point is simply this: that if he’d trusted us, it might have held.”
“That may be true. But—more than you perhaps, he trusted God.”
“Until you’ve heard it all, you cannot judge.”
“Then pray go on.”
CHAPTER 8
COVENANT
[49 of 65 quires]
January–April 1454
A DAY PASSED—TWO, then three. They waited for some repercussion. Then it had been a week, and still none came. Now, of course, Peter knows why. But at the time it struck him as a miracle, a proof, however halting and obscure, of God’s design.
Their Bible was protected. Peter had believed, at least, that they’d inquire about the progress of that fake pontifical. Yet as the year turned and the silence held, he put aside his questions and his fears. He thought of all the marks the Jews put on their doors the night the deadly angels passed to slaughter the firstborn Egyptians. The sign protecting them was not as visible, but it was surely there. The Word of God willed its completion, after all.
Gutenberg himself, of course, was unrepentant. “I will hear none of it,” he said to Peter when he coldly told him what the raid had cost. The master brushed away all talk of broken letters, missing reams of paper stock. He moved as if his garments shone, and none might touch them—as if the chain that bound him to the ordinary world had snapped. He stood, remote and folded in upon himself, and watched the presses crank. His chin was up, his body taut; for once he held his tongue. His mind was elsewhere, resurrected into glory: already he was planning the next book to come.
Peter watched him, torn between offense and a deep need he barely understood. The two of them were so alike in certain ways: both transported, burning with the energy of this new thing that only they could grasp. Both determined, and intent: for nearly four years they’d been hiding in plain sight. Even now they were untouchable, the young man marveled—although young men will always see transcendence, not the calculation clear to older, wiser eyes.
The fasting time had come again: the world was waiting for Crusade. In the markets and the churches, people braced. They put by what little food they could; husbands showed their wives the counting books, the hidey-holes, the keys. The market scribes and private clerks to those of wealth bent to their parchments, scratching out the inventories of their clients’ houses and their souls. Each citizen of Mainz was changed, inside that crumbling wall the city council made a last-ditch effort to repair. They were sinew, bone, and yet determined, fierce. They’d show the Lord that He had punished them in error. When work was done, the younger carpenters and masons honed their battle-axes and their swords and practiced in the marshy fields along the Bleiche.
Fust too hauled out a breastplate that had been his father’s, and his father’s before that. The fit was snug, but not as snug as it would once have been; his air of bonhomie had melted with his excess weight. If once he had deferred—to the archbishop, or the council, or his partner, Gutenberg—now he was grim, his forehead permanently pleated. “Such days as these I never hoped to see,” he’d say, and cross himself, yet at the same time he was strangely sanguine. He had delivered all his hopes, he said, into God’s hands.
Which did not mean he could not use his own. At St. Silvester’s he had learned, on his return from Frankfurt, of the archbishop’s raid. He went to Gutenberg without another word. He had his own key to the Humbrechthof; he’d rented that damned house with his own gold. He did not knock; he just appeared, like some fell warrior. That little escapade was a net loss, he said. Three reams would be repaid, five guilders per. His voice and face were devoid of expression. In Christian fairness he would credit any profit scraped from that disgusting screed.
The master looked in vain at Peter standing there. It was almost amusing, seeing how he turned to him, then looked away, lips working. “Somebody had to dig us out.”
“You dug that pit,” said Fust. “Not I.”
“Not you?” His partner with a black look swept the room, perceived that every ear was open and attuned. They cringed a bit, half turned away—and yet the need to know connected them, sharpened their hearing.
“If you don’t pay—” The master dropped his voice so low that only those who stood the closest—Peter, Keffer, Hans—could hear. “I have to scratch around.” His arms were spread, that same old parody of supplication; a sense of injury pinched at his mouth. I hold this up; what do you do? his cruciform and bitter body seemed to say. Fust merely snorted. A bolt of anger streaked across the master’s face. “Do not forget,” he hissed, “you’re not the only fountain in this town.”
Fust scowled and ordered them to box the sheets that he was due from the first volume. He’d hired the Austrian to do the painting. Peter nodded, keeping his own face averted from them both. Please God, just four more months, he prayed.
Grede too had changed: she saw portents, omens, in each bird, each bud, each rupture of the earth as it awakened into spring. She walked, head covered, on the Sabbath afternoons, when once she had preferred to stay at home beside the winter hearth or in her summer courtyard. The creatures of the earth would know before man did, she said. She swept her eyes to the horizon, watching for the wheeling flocks that meant that spring had come, and warring time, far eastward of the Rhine.
“When you are gone,” she said, and looked straight into Peter’s eyes, “every last one of you—” She shook her head, reproving; they walked across the boards that spanned the washing stream. He carried a large basket for the cattails and the pussy willows she had come to gather.
“What then?” he asked when she did not go on.
She took a seat on the bench, knocked from a log, that looked back toward the city. Behind them was a thick hedge and the sloping hillock of the Altmünster. She dropped her scarf and closed her eyes, as if to draw some strength from the weak sun, then opened them and stared across the roof tiles. “Men never think,” she softly said, “of all they leave behind.”
He pictured all the women then, the children in descending sizes clutching at their skirts. Imagined in a flash he tried to wipe out of his mind: the market square, a crush of arms and hair, pushed in a panic toward the steps of the cathedral; the screams and blood; the ripping cloth, the pawing, thrusting; glint of daggers and sharp lances.
“They wouldn’t leave the city unprotected.” He tried to ascertain what she held hidden in her eyes. There were small creases at the corners now, like sparrow claws.
“Oh, no?” Her smile was bitter. “There are few enough of you; if there is war, he’ll have you all.”
Despite the Sunday prohibition there were youths across the Bleiche, swinging arms like windmills, bulking up their muscles with huge hammers in their fists.
“But when they do”—her dark eyes narrowed—“you’d better leave us, each of us, protected.”
He didn’t understand. “Whatever I can do.” He reached to pat her hand. Impatiently, she shook it off.
“What’s wrong with men?” Grede looked back at the boys, their g
runts and shouts, then at the stream, its bright green bank, its gentle and incessant murmur. “What’s wrong with you, why can’t you feel your hearts?”
He knew then why she’d brought him to that spot. There was no smoke above the dyers’ hut this time, no summer herbs nor bending grasses, dancing feet or laughter. But all around him he could feel the ghost of Anna.
“You are a member of the guild.” Her eyes bored into him. “Yet you would still refuse her all the guild’s protection.”
“I refuse her nothing. She refused me first.”
“And tried and tried to reach you—or do you deny that too?”
“It isn’t your concern now—is it, Grede?”
“Will it be yours when you are dead?” She flushed in anger. “You make us wait, then leave us, then refuse to do your duty when you’re asked. For shame.” She pulled her shawl up to her chin, half turning from him.
“When we most need you,” she half whispered, “none of you are there.”
He saw her once again, her bedclothes red with blood, her mourning weeds of black.
“And I should marry her, just so she has her widow’s tithe and bread?” He almost laughed.
“How hard you are.” She looked at him as if she didn’t know him. “How hard you have become, inside that workshop.” She bit her lip, and shook her head. “I almost think that I don’t know you.”
He did not answer.
“Time was, when you wore all your feelings on your sleeve.” She looked at him with sorrow. “You loved her, don’t deny it. You love her still—you’ve just become too proud.”
Father Michael preached that day, as he preached every Sunday throughout Lent, of mankind’s fall from grace. Of Adam’s punishment for thinking he was not just greater than the creatures of the earth, but almost like to God. Peter heard, but did not heed the priest. Imago Dei, he said to himself: the Lord made mankind in His image. Someday there might be men who, with His grace and their own striving, could regain the divine spark that Adam through his greed had lost. How else were they to understand the meaning of this gift—this power given them to incarnate His Gospel?
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