Alix Christie - Gutenberg's Apprentice

“Isaiah.”

“I set it yesterday.”

“And I’m to drive the coach,” said Peter, standing and stretching as he moved toward the door. And wield the lash, he thought but did not say.

“Perhaps the Book will drive itself,” said Mentelin.

“Perhaps.”

[24.5 quires of 65]

September — October 1453

AMEAGER HARVEST CAME. And in the midst of that undoing of the world, Peter Schoeffer led the men. The books at which they labored were these six: Numbers, Chronicles, Isaiah, Saint Matthew, Joshua, and Ezra. The two partners were dispersed and wandering they knew not where. The workshop was an ark, its stout walls battened as it sailed across the rising waters.

He took the master’s desk but not his way, and without question not his title. Peter, they had always called him, and they called him still. Except that now from time to time he heard Johann Mentelin joke softly as he passed, “There goes the Rock.” And it was true that he was cool, not hot: not warm to the new men, but not explosive and unpredictable as Gutenberg had been. The weight upon his shoulders was as heavy as the mountaintops of Zion: he alone could see them in the distance, count the miles.

On the last day of September, Archbishop Dietrich formally pronounced the pope’s decree. Nicholas V ordered Crusade against the Turk. All Christendom would come together to repel the heathen foe. Inside the workshop Peter fiddled with the setting of the book of Ezra, fixing errors made by Heinrich Bechtermünze. Ezra’s verses weren’t just prophecies, but answers to the hidden meanings of Creation. He read them with great avidness; it seemed to him their present fate was just as grim as any he had set in Genesis. God had crushed the city of Saint Constantine, as He had rained the brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and unleashed the Flood. “I will teach thee whence a wicked heart is,” Ezra said: God teaches through His punishments.

Peter took the finished pages to the storeroom and tucked them under canvas, and then locked the door. The only hope was faith — true faith, like that of Noah, or of Job, he thought, the Word of God the only bulwark in the storm.

The master had cheek, pretending that he handed him a thing that ran without a hitch. As soon as he took over, Peter saw it was a lie. The Bechtermünzes struggled to complete half a page a day; the third press idled. Keffer and Ruppel were accustomed to a lengthy lubricated break while they waited for the ink on their respective pages to be dry enough to print the other side. That staggering would have to go — two able setters for each press meant there should never be a moment when they slacked, except to break for food or water. “Killjoy,” Keffer muttered with a lowered brow and half a smile, as if to probe how far their camaraderie extended. But Peter remained stone-faced, his eyes unfixed and distant, reviewing those machines, the hands that fed them, and the hands in turn assigned to feed those hands.

“Saint Peter,” they began to call him, mockingly.

Yet Peter did not ask them anything he did not ask himself. He still arrived before dawn’s light to start his daily page and did not turn to any business of the shop until those four-and-eighty lines were lying in their tray. He rarely took a break except to wolf down bread that Mentelin blessed each noontime. As darkness came, each day a little sooner, he had the candles lit; he always was the one to snuff them out and climb the last upstairs to bed. He led by his example. The person he had been before — as easy with a smile, a joke, as any other man — was purged. His calling now was vital, holy — terrible, if truth were told.

They hardly knew him, Hans said, some weeks into it. “For Christ’s sake, slow it down.” It was for Christ’s sake, Peter answered, smiling strangely, with a distance that his friends had noticed growing. “Right,” the smith went on, his short legs planted. “Then you had better listen up.” The pace was crazy — even worse his constant presence, like a ghoul behind them even when they ate or crapped or, God forgive them, tried to catch a wink. Henne had the grace at least to leave them be at night. Hans grabbed him by the shoulder and lightly shook him. “He’s right,” said Mentelin. “Go home at night, and let the poor men breathe.”

Your father’s wife and children would be glad of it, they said. And they were right. It was a hard time, and a frightening one, to be a woman by herself in a fine house. Fust in his letters had already asked Peter more than once to take good care of them, although he’d held back from requesting that he move back to the Haus zur Rosau.

In part Peter kept his distance out of pride — or else his wounded vanity, perhaps. He knew that Grede would always try to pry him open, bring his heart to speech, put right whatever had transpired between him and Anna. Since Grede had learned, he’d seen her now and then in conversation with the painter’s daughter at the market stalls. But all of that was past, and ash. The moons had come and gone between, and Peter feared nothing now except the failing of his monumental task.

His old room was unchanged. The children seemed to have grown overnight into grave and wide-eyed things. Tina especially, at eight, no longer let him guide her hand, but shook her curls and made the letters by herself. The Sabbath afternoons with Fust away were just as they had always been. Grede liked, as ever, to be read to while she stitched. She moved more slowly now, somnolent in her pregnancy, although her eyes and tongue were just as sharp. She asked him to read to her from The Little Flowers of Saint Francis : fifty or sixty tales, Floretum gathered by a Tuscan monk that told how the Franciscans came to be, and of Saint Francis’s piety and poverty and all the miracles he’d wrought.

“An interesting choice,” Peter answered with a smile. “I would not call this a Franciscan house.” She threw a silk pillow at him and said he had no call for carping at her, high and mighty now though he might be. Besides, she liked the stories of the life of Brother Juniper the best, that simple peasant who forever played the fool, abasing himself and rejoicing when the world held him in contempt.

“To be despised and mocked then, here on earth,” said Peter, taking up the little book, “is to be favored by our Lord?”

He read the tale to her of how poor Juniper stripped to his underclothes, parading through the city, drawing jeers and rocks and kicks. “The lower that he sank,” he read, “the purer was his own humility.” He looked at Grede and laughed.

“There’s nothing wrong with humility, you know,” she said and flashed her eyes.

“I never said there was.”

“Yet you are strange.” She frowned, head tilted, dark eyes sober. “You keep so much inside.”

She could not see — had still not grasped how he was changed and raised. He looked on her and felt a kind of pity.

“The humble, as you full well know,” she said, “will be rewarded long before the rich.”

“Then you had best begin distributing these jewels.” He said it calmly.

“You wouldn’t be so — cold. If you knew how she pines for you.” Grede put her sewing down and leaned toward him. “She wrote to you, but you have still not answered — is that true?”

“Truth.” It was a joke. “I thought it truthful not to lie. My great mistake.” He shrugged. “I would not do it now.”

She stared at him a moment. Then she looked down and smoothed her skirt and cleared her throat. “It’s not too late.” She leaned toward him, low voice urgent. “She was afraid; it brings her shame. She sees it now.”