Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  The master drew to his full height. “Who granted it, you ask?” His eyes swept through the crowd. “The very Highest!” His voice was booming as his arms rose up and grasped the air and shook it as he doubtless wished to shake that priest’s thick neck. “It has been granted by a God you cannot understand or see, if you doubt this. Just look, if anyone among you has got eyes—it is a miracle, a gift divine!” He dropped his hoary head down within inches of the priest. “Just look, instead of clutching at your rosary!”

  Peter stepped in before the master could make things worse. “Each copy is the same—and freer than the scribe’s from error.” He put a little pressure in the hand he laid on Gutenberg’s left arm. “The pope has called for this repeatedly, as you well know.” He caught the Spaniard’s eye. “The meaning cannot slip from text to text—and praise the Lord, the Word can spread the faster in this way.” The Spanish priest looked back down at their Bible, open-lipped; his soul quite palpably was stirred.

  Gutenberg leaned his whole weight upon his hands. Steady, Peter prayed: defend—do not offend. “Blasphemy.” He let the word out like a bitter trickle from his lips. “The only blasphemy consists in spurning what God in His wisdom has decreed.” He reached and hefted up one volume of that massive and amazing book. “See here! What God has given us, to share His Word across the world! A new technique, a miracle, that we in Mainz have birthed!”

  He glanced at Peter. Then he winked. Peter had to turn away to hide his smile.

  Gutenberg set down the Bible, flapped his arms to thin the crowd. “Time’s a-wasting,” he sang out. “If you’re not buying, get a move on. I have books to sell!” He flipped one volume open to Proverbs. “Step up! Step up!” he cried, “and touch the miracle from Mainz!”

  A trader out of Kraków took him up at once. A paper copy, sir, to pledge to the Franciscans for his dear departed wife’s eternal soul. And then another, from the Alpen lands. The master grinned and rubbed his hands. Peter took deposits, noting down each name and terms. “You should have seen the man,” he would tell Anna later. Gutenberg had never been a trader, yet the whirl of all that selling did intoxicate him, plainly. His hair was wild again, rayed out in all directions. He took the sheets and rubbed them on the gray weave of his tunic, proving that the ink remained in place. He grinned and hooted, purred, cajoled. From time to time he turned and mopped his brow and squeezed Peter’s arm. “Blind me!” he said when they had sold off twenty in three hours. Elated, he embraced his foreman on both cheeks and then turned back, shouting hoarsely to the waiting crowd. He was a trickster and a showman, a performer, Peter thought: his gift lay just as much in coaxing coins from purses as in dreaming up his new machines. You never got the one without the other, he had always said.

  At noontime Peter ventured from the bookstalls to see how Johann Fust was getting on. He let the human river carry him uphill, past the stink of fish and oil and resin into the bitter tang of hides and doggy mustiness of unspun wool. He rounded weighing scales just shy of the cathedral: bright slabs of brass slumped to the ground, chains lax; beside them lay great piles of hemp and flax. On the stairs of St. Bartholomew’s a priest stood sweating, swinging a small metal box. His other hand held Gutenberg’s indulgences. “Forgiveness from the pope, and blessings for the afterlife,” Peter heard him nasally intone. He laughed a little to himself and shook his head. They’d made it, despite everything, he thought.

  He wedged his way into the dense throng on the square that moved in all directions like a shoal of salmon flinging their fat bodies upstream. Not since Paris had he seen such masses of humanity. Here were outlandish hats on traders out of Lodz and Prague, there the northern accents of the Hanseatic merchants, bartering their herring and their furs. The gentry in their velvets and their jewels moved in clots protected by their valets, color high, eyes bright, fingering the leather harnesses and silks. The abbots and the masters of the sacred and the secular estates all bought their woolens and their metals and their raw materials here, and could be seen in their dark robes conferring. Peter passed a stand of arctic fox and sables and thought instantly of Anna. What choice! What vast arrays of sumptuous goods he might in these two weeks be tempted into buying! Emporium of wonders, fair of fairs, the greatest show and circus in the world! Entertainers drew their knots of gawkers, spitting fire and eating swords, and he had even heard that there were beasts from Asia held in cages by St. Catherine’s door.

  Beneath the Römer’s arches he found Jakob and his foreman in a vaulted space so glittering it hurt his eyes. All of Bohemia, it seemed, had set up shop with their glass beads; the colors bounced, refracting blindingly off gold and silver from the smiths of Mainz and elsewhere in the empire.

  “How goes it?” he asked. Jakob only grunted. “Too soon to say.” His uncle put his mouth to Peter’s ear. “Though I hear you have made a splash.”

  Peter smiled. “It’s going well.”

  “You’d better pray.”

  Peter rolled his eyes and pulled his tunic open to reveal the coins wrapped tight against his waist. Though most goods sold on credit, they’d asked five guilders on deposit for each book. His uncle opened up the safe.

  “What plans tonight?” asked Peter when the gold was stowed. He had a mind to see the whole of it, from gaming house to drinking ship, and not with Gutenberg or Fust.

  “I dine with Frankfurt’s council.” Jakob made a face. “Though I’ve the clear impression I’m the meal.” He’d carried some five hundred guilders in a strongbox to fork over to the Frankfurt Elders who held Mainz’s debt. His own guild hands were just as empty as the city treasury, meanwhile, owing to a shortage of raw ores. He gave his nephew his old hawklike stare. “Go cheer Johann,” he said. “You and Gensfleisch aren’t the only ones with fortunes riding on this fair.”

  Peter struck east across the square toward the house whose ground floor held the marketplace for cloth. From the Haus zum Lauberberg his father always said that he could look across to the pink gables of the Haus zum Römer and reflect that God indeed was most mysterious. If He were just, that house would still belong to Fusts, and not the Frankfurt council. He’d have been born there, if sixty years before his father’s father had not sold it and moved down to Mainz. How low we’ve sunk, he’d joke, though he was halfway serious—and never more so than this year, at this uncertain Autumn Fair.

  Just past the fountain Peter spied the Kraków furrier’s back, and ran to catch him. Perhaps he’d like not just a book, he asked, but one decorated with fine painting and then bound? The trader looked him up and down. “Depends upon the price.” He’d need to speak to Johann Fust, said Peter; he was heading to the man just now. The trader’s face relaxed. “Ah, Fust,” he said. “That’s fine, I know the man.”

  His father was in conversation with a merchant out of Genoa when they appeared. His face was grave, but cleared the instant that he saw them.

  “Waclaw!” he exclaimed and stood and heartily embraced the Kraków trader. “I think I owe you several belts of brandy.”

  The Pole grinned broadly. “Early as it is, I’ll not say no. You’re looking trim,” the trader went on as the schnapps was poured.

  “The sultan’s work,” his father growled. “The thieving Turks.” They sat and drank and spoke of trade, and Peter listened. No cloth or spice or pigments had come across the Middle Sea this year for Fust to buy and trade against the cloth from England and Brabant. He had been forced to sell off inventory, meager though it was.

  His bolts of cloth indeed were few, as was his offering of stones: some amber and some lapis out of Cornwall. Nor, Peter realized, had he yet smelled that choking fug of spice—the cloves and cinnamon and ginger—that had peppered his small nose long years before. Throughout the cloth hall there was, in fact, a marked lack of bustle. The streets were jammed and other stalls were overflowing. Everything seemed rich and pulsing, yet under it there was a hollowness. The traders from the north were fine, but beneath the Flemish lace, the Russian furs, the sardine
s and the cheeses and the hams, there was a hole where all the products from the eastern flank of Europe ought to be.

  When the Pole had left, content to order an illuminated Bible, Peter pulled out all the pledges they’d received. “This ought to help,” he said. “You ought to come and see them sell.”

  Fust licked a finger and riffled through the pile. Twenty, Peter said, at thirty guilders each—and even more once he had sought those buyers out and sold them the illuminations. Fust’s nostrils flared. “All paper,” he said shortly. “None of vellum.”

  “He says we’ll have more luck with those among the princes.”

  Fust snorted. “If any of us have the funds to stay.”

  The fair was over in two weeks, and two weeks after that the princes and archbishops and the dukes from all of Christendom were slated to arrive. They even said the kaiser might appear at Frankfurt’s Reichstag, to bash those heads and get their armies pledged for the Crusade.

  “It doesn’t seem as if we have much choice,” Peter replied.

  Fust looked at him as if he were a stranger. “So now you’re telling me my business.”

  “Follow the purses,” Peter lightly said, the buoyant feeling of the morning bursting.

  “He’s followed them for sure. Collected his own payment for the letters while he’s at it, I would warrant.” Fust shook his head and reached to grab a bolt of bright green silk. “I’d be obliged if you could hold the stand while I conduct some business.”

  “I only have an hour.”

  “Before you spell your master, I suppose.” Fust’s eyes were flat and hard. “He has his business too, his interest to collect on all his bonds—while I go pawning to scrape up the interest on his debt.”

  CHAPTER 2

  SPONHEIM ABBEY

  March 1486

  TRITHEMIUS looks up and says, “I saw it once. Your Bible.” He stands and scans his rows of books, one hand at his tired back. “It would look well on any shelf.” A little wistfully, he smiles.

  “I should have brought up mine to show you.” After the fair Peter had spent a few months rubricating his own copy, handing Anna the first page of every Bible book to embellish with her brush. It sits upon a lectern in his fine new house in Frankfurt, where he is in charge of that expanding market in new books.

  “They all sold out, then?” asks the abbot. “And the kaiser—did he get a copy too?”

  “They went like wildfire. Buyers came that whole first week, who then told other buyers.” Peter sees the master frozen for eternity, a statue with one arm flung out, the other cradling that monumental Bible. “It was amazing—though the Reichstag afterward was even more a triumph.” Piccolomini, the kaiser’s envoy who afterward became Pope Pius II, came down in person to inspect their stand. Miraculous, he’d marveled, holding up the pages of the Gospel according to John. “He ordered quires to send to Wiener Neustadt, for the kaiser to inspect.”

  “That must have tickled Gutenberg.”

  “Oh, he was like a cow in clover.” Peter cannot help himself; he smiles. It was a triumph. A memory appears as if preserved in amber: the night he and the master were asked to dine at the archbishop’s table. Gutenberg took his place among the clerks and envoys, secretaries, scribes; he was an old patrician, after all. The men bowed with great respect while he spoke knowledgeably of strategies and parleys and Crusade. Once or twice he looked intently over flaming candles at his old apprentice. See? his bright, amused expression seemed to say. Indeed Peter had seen, a thing that he more deeply than the others could perceive: the pleasure in the master’s eyes, the acknowledgment so well deserved, so long desired.

  “He was acclaimed, as you have always said,” Trithemius observes.

  “They could not criticize it, not after the kaiser himself had seen the quires.” Peter never will forget the day he met the kaiser’s envoy, an Italian prince with dark and velvet eyes. “The whole first week of Autumn Fair, we rode so high.”

  He sighs. Outside, the mist of early spring is sifting through the black boles of the trees.

  “You made more Bibles afterward, if I am right.” The abbot returns to his seat. “Both you and he—though separately?”

  The printer nods and looks up at the books that he has brought to Sponheim. No Bibles, but scholastic works, ecclesiastic law, appealing to an educated friar: Augustine, Aquinas, Clement V, and Boniface. They’re handsome in their leather rows, but nothing like those first enormous volumes they made—their Bible and their psalter. The truth of it burns him inside.

  Those were the best years of his life.

  That fair, those heady days—his last untrammeled joy. Where did it go, that whirling ferment when they rocked the world with their own hands? The sheer creative power that they had? He is an old man now, a businessman, a trader like the Fusts. The books he sells are mostly made by others; he packages them and sells them on. No volume he has ever printed has been as brilliant or sublime as those two books that he and Gutenberg made.

  “You followed in his footsteps, anyway,” the abbot says.

  Peter’s eyes caress the deckled paper of the pages peeking out from every case. The ink on every one is just as glossy as the day he printed it, he thinks. It is as if his youth is held—forever fervent, charged—between two leather-covered boards.

  “He would be proud of you, I think,” the abbot hazards.

  Would he? Would he truly? Would Peter have allowed it, even if he had been? Loss and shame swirl suddenly, unstoppered after all this time.

  “I’m not so sure.” Even now he cannot say with certainty: he never really grasped what drove the man. He knew him best—and still. The person who had stamped his life indelibly remained opaque and inaccessible somehow.

  “You were His instruments,” the abbot says, in reassurance. “As are we all.”

  Peter looks into the young man’s eyes. A mighty sword, the master called that Bible, swinging it above his head that autumn, thundering and braying. He was a force of nature, surely. How Gutenberg sent all those critics packing—the officious priests and thin-skinned guildsmen, even the archbishop. He refused to blink. That was the measure of the man, his mighty faith—in God, or in himself. It was his greatness, as the thing that they had done together too was truly great—stupendous. Yet Peter’s bitterness, for all these years, has hid this truth from sight.

  Trithemius is leaning toward him, fingers lightly brushing Peter’s hand. “You look quite tired,” he says. “The chapel should be open, if you’d like to pray.”

  CHAPTER 3

  WEDNESDAY AFTER THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

  11 September 1454

  THE FIRST WEEK is the trading week, the second one of reckoning. The traders go from stall to stall with their fat ledgers, totting up their debts against their sales. When it goes right, no more than a few coins are passed, but a great deal of libation has changed hands. The whole thing ran on trust, Fust had explained to Peter years before. A man’s word was his bond: any debts were carried over until the next fair, or the next.

  The final night fell not too long before the feast day of Saint Matthew, the patron saint of those who keep accounts. By then the endless work and wine had left the buyers and the sellers hollow-cheeked and yearning for their homes. The master would remain in Frankfurt for the Reichstag in the hope of selling the remaining Bibles to the nobles. Fust ordered Peter to stay, too, to pocket the deposits and be sure his partner didn’t cheat him. Peter only shook his head and balanced on the rope stretched between them, tighter now than it had ever been before. Thank God his fellows from the workshop had fetched up at last, halfway through the tumult and the revels. Keffer, Ruppel, and young Götz and even Mentelin, Lord bless them all. They’d meet that night aboard the drinking boat anchored beside St. Leonard’s Gate.

  But first Fust required the three of them to meet and settle up. Peter and the master headed for the Haus zur Ecken, where the goldsmiths lodged, once all their barrels had been packed with the last quires. The
y took the long way through the Corn Market so that Gutenberg could stop for some fresh clothes. He would dine well that night among the retinue of the archbishop, where he had found a bed and laid his eiderdown.

  Before they hit the Mainzer Hof they stopped, attracted by the lights and crowd. “Let’s have a look,” the master said, and they moved closer to the giant cages covered in dark tarps, from which came hisses and strange moans. A boy with a long stick was prodding something hidden by the tarp between the bars. The showman came in haste around and cuffed him, and the crowd booed and complained. “Then pay your copper!” said the man, and Gutenberg stepped forward.

  “A gentleman, at last!” The circus master smiled. He waved them in and pocketed their coins and lifted up the tarp. The world went dim. “This here’s from the far Indies,” he whispered. Curled in a corner of the cage, his huge head resting on his paws, a giant cat opened one listless eye. His fur was golden, striped with black; his tail was thick as any rope used on the Rhine.

  “What do they call it?” Peter asked, drawn by the beauty of the beast, imagining its speed. How had they laid their hands on such a thing?

  “A tyger.”

  “Stand back!” the man warned as the cat sprang up and showed its gleaming teeth. Its fur was soft and rich in appearance, yet worn in places. It seemed to Peter as it padded toward them that it looked right through him—did not see him, but the forest out of which it came, before it paced around the cage once more and dropped back like a sack. “I’ve got an oliphant as well,” the fellow said, and led them wondering to the other cage. So huge a thing they’d never seen nor even dreamed of: as tall as the Mainz wall it seemed, and just as thick, all gray and knobbly, with a snake in place of a nose. It filled the space and pressed against the bars and looked like something ancient. “They say the Turk used these to pull his cannon,” said the man, and Gutenberg gave a sharp laugh. “No doubt,” he said, and reached to feel the thick, dry hide. The thing had tusks and tiny eyes and sloping shoulders Peter could imagine hitched to those vast tubes of iron. He’d thought that he would be amazed to see these rare, exotic creatures from the East, but felt instead an obscure sorrow.