Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  “Some beasts, eh!” said the master as they moved away. “Such things as no one’s ever seen, in Frankfurt or in any other place, eh Peter?” He grinned and cracked his knuckles. “We got the best of our old beast now too, lad, didn’t we?” He slung his arm around his foreman’s neck and squeezed him. Peter laughed out of the sheer delight of living at so marvelous a time. “Indeed.” He smiled, and pictured that old humpbacked Bible Gutenberg had borrowed from St. Christopher’s two years before. The master dropped his arm, and they walked on.

  His father was waiting for them in a large front room. Jakob was there too, curled in a chair, and Peter sensed the master’s hackles rise.

  “What’s this?” said Gutenberg, but Fust just gestured that they both sit down.

  “I asked you here to be quite clear in our accounts,” his father said, taking off his glasses.

  “We’ve now sold fifty, plus the hundred you already sold.” The master shrugged his cloak off. He nicked his chin at Peter, as if he ought to reel off the new sales. But Jakob had the pledges in his safe—which Fust now brandished in a sheaf in his large hand.

  “I know. But any way I count it, we do not come out ahead.”

  Fust’s eyes went back and forth between them, but Peter could read nothing in them.

  “It’s not enough.” His father was still speaking evenly. “I will not throw good money after bad.”

  “We’ll pull it in,” the master snapped. “Seven thousand at the very least, as we had reckoned.”

  “While you charge five against that in your costs.” His father’s lips curled. “Leaving less than two thousand that we split—and I owe easily that much, on your account.” His face had hardened as he spoke.

  “You act as if there is no more,” said Peter heatedly, “when you know there will be more income from our own indulgence, and deposits on the psalter.” His father did not even twitch; he stood there stolid and unmoving. A rush of blood filled Peter’s head. The man had made his mind up.

  “Johann.” The master sprang to his feet and raised his hands. “Let’s not be rash. We haven’t started to recoup what it will bring. The kaiser’s coming—think of what that means!”

  “You and your promises.” Fust’s voice went low; his eyes were glittering. “You promised everything and crept behind my back the whole time. The missal and the prophecy and the indulgence—and now the kaiser, by your leave! I do not trust a word out of your lips.”

  “The book is done! It’s selling! What more in God’s name would you have me do?” Gutenberg looked stunned. He truly could not see why he should stand accused. And none of it did matter—all of it was dust and ash, thought Peter, trials that they’d surmounted in the wilderness they’d crossed.

  They’d made it! They had reached the final page, the Promised Land. The Revelation!—or else the Apocalypse. A band of metal cinched his chest. Peter stepped toward his father, his fists clenched. “What do you mean? That you withdraw? That you can’t wait, and have no faith in any of us, the whole workshop?” He saw his psalter type abandoned on the stone.

  The master made a little sound, a kind of exhalation, which Fust took as another Elder sneer. He wheeled on Gutenberg. “You’ve never been a partner in the true sense of the word. You ran your piece on your own terms, and hid the truth and your own follies. You must think me a fool, to accept all these years—and still more years ahead—you making hay while I am beggared.”

  Fust’s face went blank then as he turned his gaze on Peter. “You even took my son,” he said. He shrugged, as if to show that he would not be wounded. “It has occurred to me that this must be your purpose: to pay me off this pittance of a profit, then cut me out and carry on with Peter.”

  Jakob stirred, and Peter saw that look of hatred and disdain—that poison that seeped out of Mainz to blight all life. “How you can even think of such a thing,” Peter muttered.

  “You wouldn’t—” flew from Gutenberg.

  “This partnership, as far as I’m concerned, is ended. I will instruct the court that you have used my funds to your own private profit. What’s more—”

  The master didn’t even let him finish. “Calumny!” he roared. “Vile, underhanded slander!”

  “The books don’t lie.” His uncle rose, and Peter understood his role: both judge and witness to the slaughter. “You skimmed it off, to fatten your own purse. Johann’s too kind to call it what it is: pure simple theft, embezzlement.”

  “Embezzlement!” The master hacked a laugh. “Who is the thief here, stealing what he hasn’t got the brains to grasp? This was no partnership—in this, at least, you’re right.” He stabbed a finger toward Fust. “What did you bring to it? Not wit nor toil but only lucre. A merchant’s gold, and niggardly at that, while all the art and craft of it was mine alone.”

  They stood face-to-face, chests heaving, spewing hate, and Peter’s whole life shrank into the sliver of air between them.

  Fust shrugged. “You owe me interest on the first loan, too. Four hundred total for these past four years.”

  “You dare to lie and smear my name.” Gutenberg was feral then, his wild hair flying. “When all along you only fed upon me like a vulture. This was no partnership, no true and equal meeting of the minds. This work was mine—from start to finish.” His maddened eyes fell then on Peter.

  “Don’t stand there—tell him! You know the truth. There was no interest due—he forced me into training you. And now you think”—he whirled back to face Fust—“that you can simply pluck him up, and put him back to work to your advantage.”

  Peter was a tool, a little clinking sack, that in their fury they just tossed between them.

  “That’s quite enough,” his father said.

  The workshop, sacked. The presses, ores, the punches, men. The brotherhood, the priesthood they had been.

  But Gutenberg was not done yet. He’d have the last word, always. “Think on the Revelation, Johann,” he said bitingly. “And all you merchants of the harlot in the time to come.”

  “Good God!” said Jakob, springing to his feet.

  “I spit upon your gold—it has no worth compared to all the wit that God has given me to rise above you grocers. Cast dust upon your head. I’ve come too far by my own hands against you fools who set yourselves against me.” Gutenberg snatched up his cloak. “I did it all alone and owe you nothing, you who’d rip it from me, shame your soul. I need you not, I never needed you. I need no man.”

  There was a rip then in the fabric of the world, and a faint ringing. Peter heard the door slam as the master left, leaving him—Gutenberg’s apprentice, then his journeyman and foreman, finally his equal—staring mutely after him.

  He’d done it all himself. He needed no man.

  The work of letters and the tracery of ligature, the beauty of a well-proportioned line, were nothing to a man like that. He cared for nothing, no one, but his pride. A part of Gutenberg was cauterized inside. In that moment Peter understood that there would always be some moneyman to pump, new jobs to beg, new Elders, merchants, nobles, to connive. He stooped and picked up his own cloak.

  Fust made a move toward him, but Peter stopped him with his hand. Oh ye of little faith. In Jakob’s eyes he saw that smoldering resentment that turned everything it touched to rubble. He heard the harsh tongues of archangels as they poured their vials of poison from the sky: For in one hour are such great riches come to nought.

  CHAPTER 4

  SPONHEIM ABBEY

  March 1486

  SPRING IS COILED and waiting to arrive. There is a scoured feeling of expectancy in the dark earth underneath the abbot’s windows. Peter gazes through the rippled glass. Memory is like this, with its lumps and thin spots and distortions, he thinks to himself. Trithemius waits patiently; for once he does not prod.

  “It ended just like that?” eventually he asks.

  “It takes some time to wind a business down,” says Peter, turning back. “But yes, that’s when it ended.”

  Fust
filed his lawsuit six months later, after Lenten Fair. Each partner had been ordered to appear and swear the truth of his accounts. “But truth was never Gutenberg’s strong suit.”

  The reed keeps scratching, but the abbot makes no answer.

  “My father claimed that he was owed two thousand with the interest, which was not exactly truthful either. The master couldn’t pay—or wouldn’t.”

  He could have paid it if he wanted to, with the income from the Bible and indulgences, Peter still believes. “But he did not contest it. He did not even turn up for the swearing. He simply walked away.”

  Trithemius lifts his head and searches Peter’s face. “I see.”

  “And so the shop was split. He went his way, and we went ours. Each got some type and some equipment.”

  “Why didn’t he contest it, do you think?”

  “He knew who was to blame. I think he didn’t want to show his books. But more than that, he knew my father had every reason to feel betrayed.”

  “As you too have felt all these years,” the abbot says.

  “Where there’s no trust, there can be no partnership.”

  “There was no trust on Fust’s side, either.”

  “That’s true. He could not see—nor I—that we could keep on working on such terms.” A wave of sadness pushes at the printer’s chest. “Though it was hard for me, of course.”

  He has gone on to build an empire. The master left two Bibles and some grammars and some letters of indulgence and the type for an encyclopedia. He died without a son to burnish his own name. Of course, right to the end he’d thought that Peter was the one who’d carry on his flame.

  “Each of you followed your own conscience,” says the abbot gravely.

  “You still defend him then.”

  Trithemius puts down his pen. His face is thoughtful. “You yourself know how it is to deal with power,” he says slowly. “You’ve said yourself it takes a certain . . . flexibility to get things done.”

  Peter nods. He knows the corridors of power, just as Gutenberg did once. A phrase floats up into his mind, a thing the master said before they’d even started on their Bible. I know the ways of the Holy See, to my misfortune.

  “I just keep wondering,” the abbot says, “why he felt he had to make that letter in such secrecy.”

  “He made a deal to save his neck.”

  “Or else he had been backed into a corner.” Trithemius pulls at his chin. “Is it not possible he did it to keep Dietrich happy, and divert attention from the Book?”

  “If that had been his thought, he could have told me.”

  The abbot’s face fills with compassion. “He had a different code, most certainly, than you or I.”

  “I only wish . . .” says Peter heavily, “that the workshop could have been preserved.”

  “It lasted for as long as it could last,” the abbot says. He gives a rueful little shrug. “I’d say it was a miracle it even lasted for that long.”

  “A miracle.” Peter closes his tired eyes. A miracle was what they made, not what they were. And yet. He opens them, surprised. “It lasted for the time required.”

  He and Trithemius lock eyes. They held together for the time it took, perhaps, to wreak that miracle—the time that God designed.

  “Perhaps, like an apprenticeship, the term was fixed.” The abbot smiles.

  “My wander years,” the printer says. Emotion fills his chest. He looks away toward the bright fresh world outside. “He taught me what he knew,” he says, a feeling of tremendous love and sorrow rising through his body, leaving him at last. “And then he let me go.”

  The abbot nods. Neither speaks for several moments. “You did not see him again?” he finally asks.

  “Just once, the day we married.” Peter rolls the years back, conscious now that in the dross that he had buried there had been some glints of gold.

  The surprise was not that Peter invited Gutenberg, but that the master came to join that wedding celebration. By then their common workshop was closed. The families and the craftsmen followed bride and groom in two long lines from Anna’s house to St. Quintin’s, with Johann Gutenberg, flamboyant in a new green suit, alone right at the back. Fust had ordered tables set out on the Brand, and they had finished feasting and the music had begun when Gutenberg wandered over to salute them. “Now, Peter,” he said thickly, for he’d had a few. “Frau Schoeffer, bless your house.” He grinned and said a wife that comely might have weakened his own vow. And then he pulled a package out and handed it to Peter. “This should by rights be yours.”

  Carefully Peter opened it. “I don’t believe it,” he said to the master, who just laughed.

  His gift was a new-bound edition of a book that never had existed—except in their extremity and need. Four sheets of printed canticles, bound with the songs of Moses and Isaiah written out in Peter’s own fine hand: that old, fictitious present for a pope.

  “A unicat,” the master said, “so don’t you lose it, now.”

  Abbot Trithemius is smiling broadly. “Unique indeed. As was the man.”

  “I wish I’d had the wit right then to really thank him.”

  “You never did?”

  “Not in so many words.” Peter Schoeffer stands and reaches toward the bookshelves. He picks a volume out at random and opens it to the last page.

  “Everything I print, I seal with this device,” he says. “I think you’ll see the meaning.”

  His printer’s signet is the knotted branch that he’d inherited from Fust, still bearing those two dangling shields. Except that he’d replaced the names with two Greek letters, chi and lambda, signifying Word of Christ. He’d placed three stars as well, to symbolize the Trinity—each book he prints thus harking back to that great Bible they had made together, and the Gospel according to John.

  “In principio erat Verbum,” the abbot murmurs. In the beginning was the Word.

  He moves swiftly to the lectern and dips his reed to capture one last note. Peter watches, but his mind has moved past that last meeting to a different day, the day that his apprenticeship had truly ended.

  November, 1455: a bleak, cold morning. How long he waited, anxious and angry and filled with guilt, for the master to arrive. The witnesses for Gutenberg and Fust stood in a horseshoe in the great hall of the barefoot friars, across from their old workshop.

  He did not come. Peter sees them all, suspended, waiting; still he did not come. He never did. His work was done. For an instant past and present merge inside his mind as Peter hears the scratching of the reed, inscribing all they’d done and been together in the hide.

  CHAPTER 5

  WEDNESDAY AFTER THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

  11 September 1454

  THE WALK to Frankfurt’s quayside was not long. Peter left the brothers Fust behind him in the goldsmiths’ quarters, marching blindly into night. On the Römerberg rubbish piles were being burned. A bitter smoke rose heavenward, and Peter raised his cloak to shield his nose. His feet conveyed his body past the entry to the lane where they so briefly had rejoiced in their great triumph. The place was strewn with shavings from the casks that had been emptied. Through the small archway of St. Leonard’s Gate he saw the bobbing masts along the Main and quailed. He was not ready yet to face his fellows. He pushed the door and pulled aside the velvet drape and entered in the church instead.

  The light was red from votive candles, and the stone walls blocked all sound. He genuflected and slipped into the front pew. Above him on all sides, stories from the Bible were written in the panes of glass. Before him to the right of the small altar stood a tall, carved Saint Sebastian, stung by arrows, slumped against his bonds. The pain that Peter felt was not like this. It was more a tearing at his heart, tied for so long to those two horses stepping steadily apart.

  His eyes fell on the parish Bible chained to the oak pulpit. The book was fat; the hasp to which the chain was fixed was bright from years of rubbing. It would be anchored here until the iron rusted or
the leather split. Had there been chains a thousand years before, when Benedict had heeded God’s command to take His word and write it down? Peter didn’t think so. He thought then of the finished copies of their Bible setting out on their own journeys. St. Jakob’s would receive one, old man Widder too; he’d seen the copy painted by the Austrian that Fust had taken to his mansion on the Brand. The trader planned to offer it to the Franciscans. Peter had fancied he might hear those barefoot friars reciting from that Book someday, their voices drifting out across the Cobblers’ Lane into the Humbrechthof. That would not happen now; the workshop was destroyed. He bowed his head and prayed.

  He pictured them, the hundred eighty copies of their Bible, stowed in casks attached to boats—to convoys, caravans—spreading far beyond the Rhineland. It seemed to him they moved out ponderously, yet with great purpose, into the world. Like oliphants, he thought: great hidebound beasts out of the East, spreading across the land, bearing their thick and transcendental cargo.

  Aboard the drinking vessel there were casks as well, bolted fore and aft, from which the Rhine wines flowed. He found the members of their workshop gathered at a table, Keffer with his bushy beard and Götz and Ruppel, then his dear friend Mentelin. “Ahoy!” cried Keffer, “here’s our fearless leader!” They raised a toast to him. “We did it, bloody hell!” Even the closemouthed Ruppel grinned. Mentelin sloshed wine into his cup. “To Hans and Konrad,” Peter said, and raised it. “And all of you. Yours were the hands that mixed and carved and cast and made it happen.” They drummed their feet and bellowed. The hands that held those cups were blunt and hard and for a time held heaven in them, too. Like Anna’s with her brush, his own clamped on his awl or quill. He wished then for his love and home. The roaring on the boat grew raucous, and beneath the cover of their songs he bent his head to Mentelin’s. “My father ended it,” he whispered. “It’s over—workshop, psalter, all of it.” The gold-scribe put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I guess it ran its course,” he said, and squeezed it. “Gutenberg would try the Lord’s own patience.”