His eyes blinked rapidly in the new light. His hair stood out in all directions, as if he’d passed the hours in yanking at it. There was a wooden platform and a bucket, nothing else in that dank cell.
“Knock when you’re done,” the guard said as he shut the door. The master jerked, and Peter stepped inside. The darkness was a living blanket, muffling all hope.
“Are you all right?” He groped with his right hand along the stony wall. “Leave light!” he called. A beam arrived, propped in a sconce out in the hall, to cast the bench in a faint glow.
“Calumny,” the master said in a hard, hollow tone. “Calumny and criminality. I thought that you were here to get me out.” He sank onto the bench and pulled his cloak up to his nose.
“You’re fed, you’re not too cold?” The raw, cold comfortlessness of it was so shocking that Peter half forgot how they had fallen quite so low.
“Like any animal,” the master hissed, “in Dietrich’s little zoo.”
“I’ve come to see,” said Peter carefully, “if there is anything you need.”
“I need to be released. If you’re not up to that, then you can go.”
“I’m sure you know some leverage you might use. With the archbishop. Since manifestly, you’re so close.” Peter did not try to hide his bitterness.
“The fault is with those jumped-up oafs.” Gutenberg thrust his face toward him. “Your cocky uncle, and that turncoat.”
“You’re blameless then, as always.”
Gutenberg said nothing, only tightened his thin lips.
“You put it all in jeopardy.” If Peter did not speak right then, he never would. “The whole Book—and for what?”
At this the master’s eyes snapped open. His head jerked like a doll’s; he reached for Peter’s sleeve. “They didn’t get it? Didn’t find—”
“Only your press.”
The master sagged, his chin descending to his chest. “Thanks be to God.”
No thanks to you, though, Peter told himself.
Gutenberg looked up. He tried to catch his foreman’s eye. “He thinks that I colluded with the council. I!” He gave a strangled laugh. “Heard somehow I was talking to those asses, and decided I was part of the whole plot.”
“You did collude, though.” Peter said it quite deliberately. “You did collude, against the Book, and us.”
“If you think that, you are a fool.”
“I must be. If you couldn’t even find it in yourself to trust me.”
“Trust.” The master turned his face toward the wall. “What good has trust been, ever?” He shook his head, his long hair clinging to his cheekbones. “Only fools put trust in promises. I told you that before.”
“Not even your own foreman.” The pain was sharper than he’d thought.
“You are your father’s son. Your loyalties are clear.”
Peter did not answer, only sat there listening to the dripping, the master’s breath, the distant scrabbling of rats.
“I did what I had to do.” Gutenberg got to his feet. “You might not like it, but—” He shrugged. “I’ve come too far to let them get me now.” He reached and banged twice, hard, upon the wooden door.
The jailer turned the great brass key. Peter slipped out; once again the fingers wound themselves around the bars. “Just get it done,” the master hissed, and then the fingers disappeared.
They might have left him there. Peter’s father certainly was of a mind to, when he rode back to Mainz. The snakes were in their baskets and defanged, was what he said—not only Rosenberg, but Gutenberg. The thing was in a kind of balance. But what a balance, Peter thought: a mix of elements both volatile and toxic, which the slightest added grain could well combust.
If nothing changed, the city would remain the focus of the archbishop’s constant and unblinking eye. Peter did not like to think of what that eye might light upon and see.
He counted out the days that still remained. He counted the remaining pages, for they counted now in pages, not in quires. He watched as Hans and Keffer cast that new small type; when they had finished all their pages for the day, he let them set the pope’s accursed letter of indulgence.
Three days had passed. He is your partner, Peter said to Fust; Fust spoke to Jakob; Jakob spoke to Molsberg; nothing moved.
“Where are his cursed books?” his father asked at last, as if examination of the ledger could relieve the impasse. “He hasn’t shown them, damn his soul.”
“Locked in his house, no doubt.”
His father’s face was just as shuttered.
“It’s not the point, though, is it?” Peter asked.
“Not to you, perhaps.” His father’s look was distant.
“Gold. It’s all the council cares about, and Gutenberg, and Dietrich.”
“Gutenberg the first.” Fust folded both his arms and stood there in the workshop in the heat of day, and brooded.
Peter sighed and rubbed his eyes. There was a way, he said—the only way, at least, that he could see. Wearily he laid out the thin solution he had worried from his mind. What if another letter of indulgence could be found, another order, they could print? A second run of this one, or another, for some other diocese? So that the profits from this second letter—which he’d undertake to print himself—could be directly funneled to the city council? “If we can guarantee they’ll get the bishop’s cut, the council might relent, and release Rosenberg,” he said.
“Possibly,” said Fust.
“I can think of no alternative.”
“Then the archbishop gives up Gutenberg.” Fust gave him a queer smile. “And you have saved us all.”
“The only thing that matters is the Bible.”
“And the psalter.” Fust looked down onto the desk where Gutenberg had left the latest proofs. “And on and on the two of you will go,” his father said, shaking his head. His eyes were clear, all sentiment effaced. “How did you plan to do it?”
“Father.”
“I should have known. But now I stand here—cut out, and exposed. Have you no notion of how much I owe?”
“How should I?”
Fust raised one eyebrow, answered mockingly: “I’m sure that I don’t know.”
A moment passed before he spoke again. “You tell him he’ll be freed as soon as I have seen his books.” There was an edge of something—satisfaction, vengeance—in his tone. “I’ll let you do another letter, yes—but only after he produces the damned ledger, as he pledged to months ago.”
“Two weeks,” said Peter, “three at the most. And then the Bible’s done.”
“The Bible, of all books,” his father answered, “requires the truth.”
“When it is done, and sold—”
Fust cut him off. “We’ll have to sell it two times over, just to climb out of this hole.”
Heinrich Brack was no longer the prior of St. Jakob’s monastery. Lubertus Ruthard was the abbot now, the prior Eberhard von Venlo. The former prior had no doubt these younger men, reformers all, would see the cloister through. Brack turned upon his visitor a small, contented smile. His final days now could be passed in prayer and meditation.
Indeed, said Peter, it was for prayer—and guidance—he had come.
They walked across the knoll to a small bench that had been set outside the wall, affording a fine eastward view across the Rhine. On a clear day, Brack said, he sometimes caught a glint of sunlight bouncing off St. Bartholomew’s spire some thirty miles away in Frankfurt. Quietly he set his body down; no longer did he jingle at each step with all the burdens of his office.
“In three weeks’ time, God willing,” Peter said, “Gutenberg will show our Bible there.”
“So it is done.” Brack traced a cross with his thin hand in the bright air.
Peter smiled. So Brack had known, and kept it to himself. “Almost,” he said. “If God is with us.”
“Have you some doubt?” Brack’s eyes were flinty in their pouches.
“I never did before.”
Peter turned his eyes across the water. “It seemed so clear to me, the part we played. But now it all is clouded.”
The burden of so many months and years of lies and secrets felt unbearable, up there on that scoured knoll.
“It is a mighty thing for the renewal of our faith,” said Brack. “That is enough, I think.”
“And yet did Jesus not say no discord should enter in his house?”
“‘The life of man upon earth is a warfare.’” Wistfully, Brack smiled.
“Father, I would give you my confession.”
The monk laid his right hand on Peter’s head. And Peter spoke to him of all that had transpired: of subterfuge and pride and arrogance, and letters of indulgence that brought strife and not salvation. Brack’s eyes were closed, his head bent forward as he listened. In the silence afterward he nodded, eyes still closed, communing with the Lord.
“My son”—he opened up his eyes—“your sins are small. Johann Gensfleisch is a man who burns through earth and ore—and on occasion, more.”
There was a way, said Peter, they could end the feud, and save the council’s and Archbishop Dietrich’s face. He needed one more batch of letters, several thousand, at the very least. It felt to him like begging.
Brack reflected. “I think that this can be arranged.”
Peter pressed his hand in thanks.
Ruefully, the former prior smiled. “Thus, even in our own backyard do the eternal questions stand revealed.”
“Why God accepts duplicity, you mean?” Peter shook his head. “You might as well ask why He allowed the Turk to destroy Constantinople.”
“Even Satan is a part of God’s Creation—and thus a part of God.”
Then why did God not simply strike them down? he asked. Just wipe the whole world clean, as He had done before?
Their human view was partial, said the Benedictine. God alone could see the whole.
“He sees and blesses all that’s base, as well as noble?” This Peter doubted. As long as he might live, he never would accept the master’s treachery as part of the Lord’s plan.
“He gives us gifts, out of His grace.” Brack’s gaunt old face was luminous, and sage. “And then He watches us, to see how we will use them.”
“To serve the Lord, you mean, or else our private gain.” Peter did not try to hide his bitterness.
Brack smiled, and placed a hand upon his forearm. “We do not live upon this earth, my son, quite long enough to judge.”
His vision drifted over Mainz’s rooftops and her spires, the remnants of the ancient camp beneath her vineyards and her orchards. “The Romans, too, were geniuses at engineering. Inventors of such marvelous techniques. Yet they have left us nothing but some stones and rubble.”
CHAPTER 4
SPONHEIM ABBEY
March 1486
FOR THE LONGEST TIME he thought he could prevent it. Peter would hold the two of them together as they strained apart, through his sheer strength, the force of his own will.
“The thought was unacceptable to me, that the workshop might be torn apart.”
Outside Sponheim Abbey winter has redoubled its assault, as if to punish the temerity of crocuses and hope. A freezing rain beats at the windows in which Peter sees reflected one old man, his hair gone pewter, and the back of one young Benedictine less than half his age. It strikes him that he’s nearly the same age the master was, the year he died.
“This . . . altercation,” asks the abbot, “happened the same year the pope declared Crusade?”
The printer shakes his head. “The summer after. The princes and the clergy met incessantly for months, but could not come to terms.”
It was that letter of indulgence that destroyed the workshop, he has always felt. “It might have ended differently, but for the Turk.”
Again the abbot gives a little smile. “Yet as I’ve said, the book was done, as well as both of those confessionalia.”
“It wasn’t the letters per se—but what they represented. Lies. Deceit. That was the fundamental breach.” Methodically, Peter sets out the counts of treason.
“First Gutenberg concealed too much. But more than that—he put the Book at risk. He was prepared, as well, to fleece my father and the guilds. Ends for him always justified the means, however roughshod he might run you over.”
“And you,” the abbot says, “were caught between the hammer and the anvil.”
Mirthlessly, Peter laughs. “The insane thing is that I still hoped. I had this wild belief that all would come out right, if we could only make it to the fair.” He shakes his head. “We were so close! I thought if we could just hold on, the revenues would fill the holes—especially that gulf that since the prophecy had grown between them.” He shakes his head again and strokes his throat, a tenderness inside for his young self.
“I put my whole self on the line. I nearly killed myself, to make that second letter, carving every night those final weeks.” So cruelly had he pressed the crew and his own body that he hardly can recall that final burst. They were machines by then, churning blindly, truly.
“You didn’t use Hans’s type?” asks Trithemius, surprised.
“I didn’t want to give him even that small satisfaction.” Peter looks the abbot in the eyes. Deceit will breed deceit; in those last months when he had felt betrayed, he’d kept his secrets, too. “Besides, I had my reasons. Technical improvements I was working on, that I could use a smaller alphabet to test.”
The abbot waits, but Peter says no more. There is a kind of stiffness to the monk as he sits facing him, the printer thinks. He is polite, but something in his attitude suggests he is more critical inside. So be it: every chronicler must sift the stories he is told.
Trithemius will never see the shining city they had built, like Augustine’s, inside that workshop dug into the earth. He’ll never know how it was both monastic cell and nave to that young man and all who labored there. Peter wipes a hand across his face. He’s had his fill of boats and wagons driving up this muddy forest track; he’s tired of telling the whole sordid tale. It’s painful still—the recognition is unwelcome. He’d thought that he’d forgiven them both long ago. But now he finds they’re still inside his mind, both of those fathers, locked so blindly in their battle that they can’t perceive the hellfire that they rain on those below.
How zealous—yet how fragile—he had been. He feels a twinge of pity for that stern young man, who offered his own self as the connecting wire—the thin gray bead of solder.
CHAPTER 5
FRIDAY AFTER THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT
[62 of 65 quires]
12 July 1454
Both hostages were freed, after some haggling over the cut that Mainz would get from every letter of indulgence printed for the Cologne diocese. The only one remotely pleased with this was Jakob. Gutenberg returned, his body clean, his bearing truculent; he thrust a packet under Peter’s nose. “Accounts, in black and white,” he said, and turned his back. No word of thanks, not even an acknowledgment; Peter should have known. The man could not be humbled. Just the reverse: his manner was abrupt, offended. How dare they question his veracity, was all his haughty look, his brisk resumption of command, conveyed.
He took a Bible sheet up off the press, found fault with it, asked querulously where the devil his own letter was. “Set up for press,” came Hans’s answer. Peter turned and made his escape. The packet in his hands was thick with wax, stamped front and back with that queer pilgrim’s seal. As if he’d even think to spy its contents. The workshop’s debts, thank God, were not his cross to bear. He had enough to carry with this second letter and those final quires.
Rapidly he walked down to the Brand and put his head in at the Haus zur Rosau. He heard his stepsister’s keening from the moment Lothar opened the front door. The wails were coming from the kitchen door that gave out on the courtyard.
Tina’s back was shaking from the sobs that racked her skinny frame. She didn’t cease her frenzied wailing even when h
e sat down on the stoop beside her. “There, there,” he said, and moved his palm in circles on her back. Grede must have left her there to blow the tempest out; no doubt she’d tried, and failed, to calm her. “Tina, my big Tina girl,” he whispered. “What’s wrong? Give me your hands.”
She turned tear-thundered eyes on him and hiccupped, sniffed, resumed her keening at a lower and less frantic pitch. He lifted her limp hands and sandwiched them between his. “Now, chickadee, tell me what’s wrong.”
“Cassius,” she gulped, “and Prinz. Father says—” She drew a ragged breath, and then came sobs.
“Father says what?”
“That they are to be sold. Oh, Peter!” she cried, turning and flinging both arms about his neck. “Say you can stop him. He is mean and cruel to take my very favorites!”
He clucked and soothed and looked across the courtyard to the stables. “Papa can’t do everything. He must have a good reason.” The meaning of it bowed his shoulders, too.
He would not say to her that they were only horses. Only beasts—albeit Fust’s most steady team. Two of the six that pulled his convoys and his wagons, and when home would whicker softly for their apples from the stalls. “Perhaps we’ll find a way to keep them, or to visit them, at least,” he said. She pulled away; she knew it was a lie.
In all these years not once had Fust been forced to sell a horse. He’d leased them out, from time to time, when things were tight. The letter with the master’s ledger dug at Peter’s side. How bad was it, if Fust must sell the very assets he depended on to ply his trade? The interest on the loans that ran the workshop totaled a hundred guilders every year, Peter knew—part to the Jew, part to the Lombard.
Gently he disentangled Tina’s arms and carried her inside. Grede came as he was laying her, a raglike bundle, on the couch. “It’s better now,” he said, and Grede put a cool hand on the child’s brow. “Sleep,” she whispered. The two of them stood watching for a moment, then went out. Grede draped the cloth she carried on the table. “Won’t you join us, just this once?” She gave him a wan smile. “It’s been so long.”
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