Gutenberg's Apprentice (12 page)

“You people like ’em big,” Hans went on. “Burgundy’s not half so grand.”

Peter looked at him, surprised. “The Katzenelnbogens hold the toll,” he answered. “Downriver at Saint Goar.”

“Thieves. They’d melt the gilding off their fathers’ coffins.”

Peter laughed. “You’ve worked for nobles, then?”

“My old man’s shop hung on the Strassburg bishop’s orders.” Hans looked slyly at him. “I’ve seen my share, believe me too, with Henne.” He screwed his eyes up. “Nasty brutes, the lot. Always grinding at the prices, pitting brother against brother in the guild.” It was a speech, for Hans.

“I heard the master was a member there.”

Hans grinned. “He couldn’t carve to save his life. But he was damn sure tickled to be asked.” Hans turned, and as he did, whacked Peter on the back. “If it makes you any gladder, he’s as rude to all them high-and-mighties as he is to you.”

They walked back across the stream that cut the fishing village from the city proper. They’d almost reached the lower Rackgate when they heard the bell: a deep, commanding boom. The tower of St. Martin’s. Peter had not heard or felt that sound in years. The rumble of it tolled his very bones. Before they’d crossed the span and made their way inside, another bell rang, higher by an octave, and then a third: St. Stephan’s, St. Quintin’s. The voices of the churches opened one by one and swelled into a giddy chorus.

They made their way along the streets, filled suddenly with people rushing out. Strangers fell on strangers, hugging, laughing; Peter felt his own throat fill. The ban was lifted—there could be no doubt. The clamor of the bells drowned out all other sound. As Heilant had predicted, peace in time for Christmastide: Dietrich had released his fist. The crowd surged blindly, bearing them like sticks toward the marketplace and the cathedral. St. Martin’s doors were now flung wide. But at what price? Peter had the time to wonder, as the tide tossed them like dazed survivors at the Golden Mallet—where for once they entered undetected, raised their mugs, and drank to golden Mainz among their fellows.

CHAPTER 8

MAINZ

        
January
–
May 1451

H
E’D WORKED the calculus of duty in his head. Peter owed an alphabet of lead, no more. What they would do with this new letter mattered little to him as he pictured the great chancelleries in which he’d find a place. There was no further talk from Fust of marriage contracts; Peter guessed his father knew that he might bolt if pushed. Gutenberg meanwhile procured a missal book that he dismembered, fanning out the pages on his desk. Sacks of ore appeared, a bale of paper half as tall as Hans. Konrad hammered a new casting box, and Peter took a spot beneath the window frame and started tracing.

For all that he despised this art as crude, it was not in his nature to draw badly. The paper that he used was of pure linen, free of imperfections, to avoid the slightest wobble in the lines that he would transfer onto metal punches. The alphabet he planned must be as fine as any he had drawn, to sing the psalms and say the words of the apostles. He traced and retraced each line, swash, and spur, and spaced the letters widely on the large white sheet. Each time the bell struck one more hour he rose and stretched his arms and thawed his fingers at the forge. Hans, peering over his right shoulder, bellyached that all those fine connecting lines would drive them blind. The master and his father hovered too, until Peter brusquely said he couldn’t concentrate with them both breathing down his neck.

It took him three full weeks to draw the letters to his satisfaction. He made them larger, blacker, tighter than the letters of the grammar: written closely, they resembled a thick mat of woven thorns. He could not do it any faster. He understood by then that every single one would be the progenitor of all the hundreds, even thousands, they would cast precisely in its image. He drew full letters in two sizes, majuscules and minuscules, ligatures, abbreviations; each size required two hundred different hunks of type. Hans and Keffer looked like cattle stunned before the kill when they considered how long it would take to carve and cast those alphabets.

“I’ll pray for you,” said Peter with a little smile, touching one stiff finger to the cap he wore to keep the hair out of his eyes. When he was done, he left the finished sheets for Gutenberg in a clean pile.

He didn’t want to care, and yet he did. He came in the next day both wary and expectant. The master was already sitting at his desk.

“I might have known you’d bankrupt us,” he started. The flame lit only half his face; he wore a pair of lenses on the bridge of his long nose. “You’d have us slave a year, I guess, to cut these?” The words were as caustic as ever, yet there was something different in his tone. He lifted up one sheet and scrutinized it, and turned to Peter standing there. Gutenberg’s apprentice saw the flicker of a smile. “It’s strong, though. Black. And still with a slight feeling of the hand.”

“It is compressed, compared to many.”

“So then it saves on parchment.” The master grinned and handed all the pages back.

Hans showed Peter how to forge the brass in rods they clipped and hammered to a square-tipped shaft. They made hundreds of these golden wands, which they then carved. Peter watched the old smith hunker at the bench, the shaft clamped in a vise, a little square of paper with the first of all those letters in his hand. Hans let a drop of flax oil fall onto the paper, watched it go translucent as the ink began to shine, then flipped it. The letter was as perfectly reversed as if they viewed it in a mirror. He laid the letter on the metal tip and rubbed it softly with his finger: the inky shape lay on the brass now in reverse, and ready to be carved.

The goldsmith fingered through his chisels for a tiny blade no thicker than an awl. “Pray for us,” he said, with a bare smile, and screwed a glass into his eye. It was an old, familiar sight: the craftsman bent, absorbed, his eyes and fingers joined in one exacting act, the world shrunk to a space no larger than his touch and breath.

When it was Peter’s turn to try, he stretched his neck and arms and emptied out his mind. He grasped the chisel—like the quill, it was a pure extension of his hand. The metal peeled like shavings of cold butter from his blade. He tapped, and watched it flake, moved down a hair and tapped again and blew the shining shards away. Hans said that metal had a grain, like wood; you had to learn to know the way it gave. The letter was the simplest stroke, an
l
. Peter tapped and flaked and blew. Deeper, Hans said. Straighter. There. An hour, then two. And then the slanted cap atop the stroke, the angled basin of its heel. Hans handed him a brush, an even smaller awl. Peter felt a stinging in his eyes; he wiped the sweat off, bent back down.

Scribes often noted in the edges of their manuscripts the ways they suffered in the handiwork of God. A sharp complaint, secreted in a margin:
Thin ink, may night fall soon. I’ve finished now. For Christ’s sake, bring me drink
. Writing caved the ribs and torqued the back and fogged the eyes. Once in Saint-Victor’s library in Paris Peter had discovered a whole string of notes from the same scribe:
This parchment is certainly hairy
, he had carped,
this lamp gives a bad light
. And yet until he bent for hours above that shaft of metal, Peter never really understood his closing thought:
Just as the sailor yearns for port, the writer longs for the last line.

At last he straightened, stretched his aching neck, and reached the finished punch toward Hans. The smith turned toward a candle, held the tip above the flame, rotating it until the whole was covered in a film of soot. “Smoke proof,” he grunted, pressing it onto the paper. And then they saw where it was wrong, where right; they placed the punch back in the vise, and sliced minutely at it one more time.

The work of the apprentice is the taming of all impulse: in place of pride, humility; impatience mastered, then subdued. It took Peter back to his first weeks at the scriptorium, where Anselm started by removing feathers, vellum, leather pouches, ornament of every kind. He stripped the pupils down to one thin reed, a lump of lampblack, one plain sheet. To learn the silencing of will, of the murky self: to strip their bodies and their minds to the essential. Apprenticeship, he said, was patience, and a deep, abiding faith: again, again, and yet again, until the hand was firm, the soul scoured clean. For only then would they be purely Adam’s flesh, a conduit, a channel.

Hans told him that he had “the feel.” The way that he touched Peter’s elbow, took his proofs out to the light, and traced his horny nails around each contour was a sign of his regard. He grumbled out of habit when the “scribbler” wasn’t satisfied. “Feinschmeckery,” he’d mutter. Fussbudgetry. Yet Peter noticed how he started taking just that bit more care at his own carving, holding his own work to that same “fancy” standard.

As fast as they were finished with each punch, the others took them to make molds and started casting: not just Keffer and Konrad but the master as well. Through that dark Lenten season Gutenberg too rolled up his sleeves. It wasn’t, Peter thought, that he was suddenly awash with fellow feeling. The truth was that the man could not sit still.

It weighed on Peter, nonetheless, the fact that the master hadn’t even had the grace to compliment his draftsmanship. He said as much to Hans. The goldsmith looked into a middle distance. “Never had to,” he answered with a crooked smile. “Everybody comes to him regardless—like bees to nectar, trout to flies.” Gutenberg in Strassburg: those had been the times! Everybody wanted something from him, and he pulled them to him with his tinkering, his strange ideas, just like iron filings. Important people seemed to think he had the next big thing secreted in his sleeve. They damn near threw their money at him: there was a bishop’s nephew and a paper miller, some patricians with large holdings, paying court. His first machine convinced them: a wheel for polishing that he had dreamed up to smooth those pilgrim’s stones. They backed him handsomely when first he fit those stones into the frames that Hans had stamped to make the bloody mirrors.

“We had a good ride there, by God. We didn’t hide away like here.” The master was admitted everywhere: not just into the noble houses but the craftsmen’s lodges. He’d been respected and praised, much more than in the city of his birth. He didn’t give a rat’s ass for the Mainzers’ clannishness, their snobbishness.

Which did make you wonder, Peter said, why he’d come back.

“Inheritance. This house.” Hans looked balefully at the bleak, soot-streaked walls of their confinement. “His mother left it to him and to his late brother, Friele.” Besides, those foaming Armagnacs had Strassburg in their sights—it was a panic, Hans said, knowing that the mercenary army was a day or two away after having raped and pillaged half Alsace. The master paid his share to buttress the defenses, but he didn’t wait around. “We hot-footed it, believe you me.” The old smith grinned. “To him this house in Mainz was providence.”

Lent came late that year, halfway through March. It was a lucky thing, for otherwise the Main would have been frozen and the merchants forced to travel overland to Frankfurt for Lenten Fair. Fust sailed away, but Gutenberg remained, although they knew the Elders claimed the payments on their bonds two times a year, at autumn and at Lenten Fair. He must have sent a proxy, Peter thought, as he went to the Schreibhaus to see Petrus Heilant. The Elders still collected interest on the loans they’d made to Frankfurt, Speyer, Worms—though only half on every guilder that Mainz owed. This was the deal that Dietrich had exacted in exchange for lifting off the ban: he’d bailed the city out in part—and in return had kept immunity from tax.

The staleness of the air inside the clergy’s meetinghouse disgusted Peter more and more. Or maybe it was just the act of begging that disturbed him every time he stooped to enter the low portal. Heilant was blandly reassuring that a break would come in time, but precious little seemed to come from this. In the depths of that cold penitential season, Peter felt the hope begin to leach out of his bones.

He told himself each letter punch was one more link he broke in the thick chain that anchored him to Mainz. He’d add one to the pile; another shattered link would drop. He’d asked for his own workshop key so he could work at night. If he could pick the pace up, he might finish by midsummer and be off.

One evening a few weeks after Easter he was working late, taking advantage of the light. Spring had come at last, and with it the sweet lengthening of days. The men had gone upstairs, the master back across the courtyard. Gutenberg appeared to find it unremarkable that Peter chose to work on his own time. He must have thought that his apprentice drove himself the way he did—or so his brief, distracted nods conveyed.

Peter lit two candles to chase any shadow from the metal in the vise. He lost himself in concentration. Some time later—one hour, two—he heard a door close, quick steps, then the workshop door heave open. The light had gone, he saw as he looked up. The master crossed toward the workbench and started rummaging among the tools. He took a blade and then came over to where Peter labored.

“Night work.” He snorted. “The guild would stop it, if they ever got their nose in.”

Peter nodded, looked back down.

“It isn’t any of their bloody business.” The master’s face was waxy in the dimness; he held a book clamped underneath one elbow.

“No.” Peter looked back up, surprised. Gutenberg had been a guildsman, ex officio; Hans had said so.

“Time and tide waiteth not.” The master stood there, lost in thought. And then he shook himself and lifted a finished punch that lay at Peter’s elbow. “What, six weeks? Thereabouts?”

The end at last was in their sight. Again Peter nodded.

“Ligatures tomorrow, then,” said Gutenberg, half to himself.

The main alphabets were done; the master had ordered Konrad to build trays to hold the letters, certain pockets made larger for the characters they’d need in great abundance. There was a rigor to that logic even Peter could admire. There were no rules when Gutenberg set out: he’d cobbled everything from what he knew of smithy, weavery, scriptorium. He’d had them knock together slanted racks to hold those letter cases, wooden trays to hold the finished lines and pages. It was the brilliance of that mind to see a thing—a person too—in pieces, Peter thought. Efficiency and speed, he always said: no step or motion should be wasted.