Alix Christie - Gutenberg's Apprentice

He took one sheaf to show her in their secret pew. When he unrolled the verses, Anna gasped. “Mary mine,” she said. “I’ve never seen… its like.” Transfixed, she gazed upon the even blackness of it, ran one finger down the sharpness of the margin. “You are a saint — I am amazed.” She raised her shining eyes to his. “To think these hands”—she twined her fingers round his wrist—“hold this extraordinary gift. To think — they write God’s Word — and will be mine.” She threw her arms around him, raised her lips.

So full of love, and admiration. So sweet, so trusting. Peter felt his face begin to burn. How could he lie? What was their life — what would it be? — if it were founded on a lie? A wave of shame engulfed him. “It was not I.” He let the sheet fall as he peeled her hands away. “I did not write these lines.” Confusedly she looked between his fingers and the page.

“I do not understand,” she said. She was so pure, so true — and he a liar, to her, a liar and a thief. A burning need to purge this fakery consumed him. “I should have told you long ago. But I was bound to silence, and too weak.”

“You’re not a scribe?” she faintly said, and tried to free her hands.

“A scribe, yes — but not only. This kind of writing is much more.” He breathed more freely. “We all were forced to swear a vow. But I can stand the secrecy no longer.”

He tugged her to her feet and led her, almost at a run, outside and down the path along the bishop’s Little Court. Across the marketplace into the Cobblers’ Lane, around and through the back. The lane was empty, just a mangy cat that glared at them, contempt in its gold eyes. He wondered if the beast could sense the knocking of his heart as he unlocked the workshop door. He took her hand and slipped inside.

He tried to see the whole thing with new eyes — her eyes. The shrouded presses, humpbacked widows draped in black; the bricks of metal on the workbench like a shining row of loaves. Beyond these the faint glow of coals kept burning, banked inside the mighty oven made of brick and stone. He led her toward the desk beneath the window where he’d sat and carved the letter punches. That first, totemic scrap of parchment still hung curling from a nail.

“This is my script,” he said, and took it down and pressed it in her hands.

“Your script?” Her fingers trembled as she peered in the poor light. He struck a flint and lit a candle. “Where is your workbench, and your quills?”

“It’s true, I wrote them with a quill — at first.” He raised a finger to her lips, parted now in consternation. “But these, you’ll see, have not been drawn.”

Her eyes flipped back, with dread and fascination, to that solitary line: In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

“Come,” he said, and drew her into the composing room. He reached into his case, into the majuscules, pulled out a letter A . Her mouth fell open as he put it in her hand.

“It is a new, amazing way to write,” he whispered. “Each letter gets a film of ink, and then we press it on a page.”

She stared dumbstruck down at the chunk of metal. “This isn’t writing.”

“A kind of… artificial writing. Come.” He led her toward the hulking presses. Beneath the cloth a forme lay waiting, bound in its stiff block. “See how we tie them all together, into lines—” He ran a finger on the metal, bent to see which page. “The book of Exodus,” he told her proudly.

Anna stood entirely rigid at his side. When he glanced up, he saw a look of fear, repulsion, in her dark and slanted eyes.

“This isn’t writing,” she repeated. “Nor these books. This is a smithy, do not lie.”

“I do not lie.”

“Not now? When you have lied to me before?”

He reached for her, but she stepped back and put her hands into her cloak.

“I felt the same, when I first saw it,” he said softly — remembering how he prayed to Benedict of Nursia, whom God had charged to write His Word. But Anna was just shaking her small head, a look of horror in her eyes.

He crossed the room and picked up a Donatus. “This was the first book that we made.” He gestured at the press. “And that will be the next.”

She blanched. “You toy with me.”

“I swear it by this scripture.”

“Swear not on something you defile.” She looked wildly around the room, fixed on the little copy of the Bible, broken and dismembered on the master’s desk. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“You do not even try to see,” said Peter fiercely.

“I see enough. I see that you deny the very gifts He gave us.”

Silently he begged her. But she was shaking now.

“ He did this.” Suddenly she whirled and advanced on him. “He did it, didn’t he? They say he is a hard and angry man.” She fingered the slim grammar Peter still held open, looked an instant at it, pushed the thing away.

“We did it, all of us.”

“Then it is truly some dark evil that has overcome you.” Anna crossed herself. And then she looked at him, her dark eyes narrow and her voice high. “Where are your hands? Your eyes? I thought we shared that touch, at least. Yet now you worship all that’s hard and cold and dark.” She shook her head. “As if the Lord could live inside a hunk of metal.”

“Chalices are metal. And the altar and the figure on the cross.”

“You take yourself for something you are not.”

“It is the path,” he said, “to which I have been called.” His hands dropped to his sides.

“You truly blaspheme then,” she said. “And I would leave this pit.”

He raised a hand toward her, empty of words. His breath, his heart, his very being, seized. There was a dreadful silence. Then in that searing gap he heard, far off, the scraping of a door. A distant sound: it entered him and knocked and became known. The door onto the street, then footsteps, hard and brisk, across the courtyard. Anna’s face went pale. “He’ll have my head,” hissed Peter, throwing the cloth back on the press. He took her roughly by the arm and dragged her toward the windows. When there was no mistaking that sharp tread, he thrust the grammar in her hand and turned to face him.

Gutenberg said nothing for a terrifying moment. He did not need to. His baleful eyes raked both their faces. “Could you not find a barn for fornication?” His voice was hateful. “Jesus, I should chop it off.” He took two steps and thrust his livid head toward Anna’s pale and frightened face. “And you, my girl, if you so much as breathe a word, I’ll have you thrashed.”

She slipped beside and past him, nodding, hurried up the stairs. A flash of her green skirt was all that Peter saw before his arm was gripped as if by death’s own bony hand.

“Give me the key.” His breath was vile. “You are confined from here on out. Thought you were gifted, eh? A special case?” He leered, lips twisted in a grimace. “You’re nothing but a scheming sack of shit. The key, now. Then you get to work.”

What happened next is a white blur. Peter remembers only going to the forge. He sees his hands, carved marble, loading pans of ore into the fire. He pushed them deeply in the flames and thought, as he had not for many months, that it had not been God but Satan who had tempted him and raised him up and thrown him down to die. Injustice twisted in him as he reached his arm in, stirring, leaning in too far. The skin shone and the hairs began to curl. His hopes, too, were no more than flaking, whitened ash. This was not his calling, nor his path. Angrily he pulled the lead cakes from the forge, and in his wretchedness he lashed at them, began to bash his tongs into the cooling metal.

The tongs bit deeply in the molten cakes, leaving clear impressions, deep and sharp as footprints in wet sand.