Gutenberg's Apprentice (34 page)

For terrible long seconds no one moved or spoke. The soldiers came like washerwomen from the drying lines, the full sheets hanging from their arms. Erlenbach moved toward the desk, his right hand sweeping the whole surface clean: of inkpot, quills, a pile of paper scraps, the litter of a half a dozen mirrors. His foot came within inches of the book as he turned, snarling. “Insolence. You will hear more.”

Obediently, Peter dipped his head. “I welcome it,” he said. “His Grace has not yet seen the product of our work.” And from the corner of his eye he watched the heel move, almost grazing the thick sheaf—his breath stopped, his throat closed. He swallowed, then advanced and held his hand out.

The knight just eyed it with contempt and pulled his mesh and leather gloves back on.

“Men die who treat me as a fool.” His tone was thuggish, threatening. “Gensfleisch will answer for this—if he’s not already singing.”

He turned, his long cloak snagging on the corner of the book, then pulling free, swirling above his feet as they receded, followed by the thick tramp of his soldiers, bearing their mean spoils.

The minute they were gone, Peter loped the hundred yards across the Quintinstrasse, through the churchyard to the Hof zum Gutenberg. Lorenz unlocked the door. His eyes were wide, his gray hair flying from his head. “They’ve took him off, young master,” he said shakily.

Peter strode down the hall, looked briefly in the master’s study, noted how the stools were knocked about. The stacks of papers on the table were all gone; whatever copies of the prophecy the fool had kept there too. The door onto the little courtyard was ajar, a wake churned through the whiteness toward the stable door. He wrenched it open, groped into the alcove for the tinderbox, and struck a light.

The press was stripped of its protective cloth, which they had stamped into the straw. Whatever type had been left standing in its bed was gone. A twist of twine hung from the bar. He turned toward the desks, the master’s high one and the table by the window, where he’d cut that type an age before. There’d been a setting case there too, to judge from the now-empty frame they’d left behind. Whatever type the master kept in all those pockets had been seized, along with the large case. Peter wondered for an instant how they’d lashed it, four foot square, onto a horse. God damn him. May God send down His plague on him, the arrogant, self-centered fool.

Wiegand and Lorenz stood behind him, gaping. “Get everything that isn’t nailed. Put any type you find into a sack, and every frame and stick.” The press, exposed, he could not help. To Wiegand he said slowly, carefully: “Then go to Hans, and have him send as many as he needs to haul it to the Humbrechthof.” The boy nodded. Peter took a final look, and then went out to find the man.

The fool would crack before they’d even heated up the tongs—if force was even needed, any kind of torture. More likely Gutenberg would spill it of his own accord. Peter wished for catgut then, a metal brand—anything to seal that proud, loose mouth.

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

F
ROM 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.