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  The little chimney clock struck nine as he slipped into the Haus zur Rosau. With stealth he climbed up to his room. His father was away, and he could not bear to speak to Grede. Awkwardly he pulled the tinderbox to him, held it underneath the elbow of his bandaged hand, and struck the flint. The flame was weak; his image flickered in the glass that Grede had hung above the basin. Peter stared a long time at his blackened face. He saw a ghastly, staring beast, eyes white against the grime that caked its skin. He poured an icy stream with his right hand and watched as the dipping of his hand, the wiping of his cheeks, turned the water from clear to black. His eyes were coals now, in that brutal whiteness. Which was he then, a man or beast? This wasn’t even work that in the end brought forth some lovely thing. A brooch, a chalice, or a gleaming monstrance could at least lift a soul above the flames. He might as well have left the farm and gone straight to the Saxon mines.

  Peter dried his right hand and pulled the candle toward the parchment he had left upon the table. His Cicero had been returned without a scratch—as if to prove once more his father’s power. The calfskin bore a few dark swirls of pasture life, the residue of loam or blood or sinew. He pinned it with the elbow of his bandaged hand, moving the pumice in a growing circle with his right until the color was more even. He set the stone aside and blew, brushed off the few remaining grains. The sheet was ready now, smooth and unblemished.

  He heard the voice of his first real writing master nearly every time he drew the ruling lines. Brother Anselm, at St. Peter’s on the hill in Erfurt: Your hand is but His tool. Peter flexed that tool and grasped the ruling bone. The parchment that we write on is pure conscience, on which all good works are noted. He struggled, with his damaged hand, to smooth the sheet. The ruler that we use to draw the lines for writing is God’s will. He laid his ruler flat and with his bone scored a sharp line, then dipped his quill: The ink with which we write is pure humility, the desk on which we write the calming of our hearts.

  He breathed, and wrote, and in the writing felt it enter him: the stillness at the center of all things. The stillness and the soaring freedom of the Word. Not only God’s, but all the wisdom He imparted to those willing to receive it. When Peter was but shepherd’s son, he’d dreamed one day he’d be a priest—transfixed as he’d been then by all the beauty and the mystery of trees and fields. At university he took all four lower orders of theology; the Benedictines beseeched him to remain and take his vows.

  But he had known—or merely prayed—that God had traced for him some other path. He knew it still, and more acutely, faced with this new devil. The candle guttered in a draft, and Peter paused. What is your meaning here, O Lord?

  Père Lamasse had counseled him not even one full year ago, when Peter confessed that he desired to leave the library at the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. Much as he loved the worship of the monks, he felt a pull toward the swirling, pulsing world outside. The abbot touched his head and said the Lord had portioned out to each his own appointed task. This was the goal of our life’s journey: to listen and to wait, and when it came, to heed the call.

  Peter sat there, feeling every heartbeat in the scorched flesh of his hand. God knew he was no priest. And if one thing was clear to him, he was no smith—and never would be.

  CHAPTER 3

  MAINZ

  October–November 1450

  HIS FATHER RETURNED just before All Soul’s Day. Grede’s bustling—the hanging of the tapestries, the laying of the fires—let the household know that he was due. Peter’s hand was nearly healed. His stepmother had used the age-old remedies of women from the land: a comfrey poultice mixed with feverfew to leach the heat. The scars were hard to see unless you knew to look.

  Fust had been gone a month by then. Grede said he might still try to squeeze in one more trip before the snows. He’d managed to evade the bishop’s ban; somehow he’d found a way to buy and sell. Peter did not ask how lucky or how foolish that might be. As he went to find Fust at the customs hall, he had more pressing matters on his mind.

  The Kaufhaus had been magic to him once. Many times he had been sent by Fust’s first wife into its lofty, aromatic vault—had woven, senses stunned, among its sacks and bales to fetch the man he’d learned to think of and address as Father. It was a temple too, Fust always said—not to the Lord, but to the trade that made His world go round. Teak and tusks and barrels of Madeira; carded wool and coal; oils and spice and Rhineland wine; nuts and ores and semiprecious stones. How Peter as a boy had breathed in all those swirling scents: of skins and wood sap, tang of sweat and citrus, flavors of the distant lands from whence these goods arrived.

  From the knoll outside the Hof zum Gutenberg he could see the cornice lifting up above the blue slate rooftops, surmounted by a lordly frieze of statues hewn from red Mainz sandstone: the seven prince electors—three archbishops and four worldly lords—of the Reich. Their own archbishop, Dietrich, held the center, gazing down on them with massive, sightless eyes.

  The more substantial merchants kept their offices up on the gallery that ringed the trading floor. The hall was quiet, just a few high wagons left unhitched inside the portal. Peter threaded past the shrouded stalls and climbed the worn stone stairs toward the office marked “Fust Brothers.” A scribe had lettered it in gold some years before, each word inside a shield that hung from a brown fustus, the knotted branch that was the emblem of their house. Peter heard men’s voices, recognized his uncle’s, knocked and pushed the door.

  “Peter!” Fust rose, smiling broadly. “You must have second sight. I only just arrived.” Indeed, he was dressed as plainly as a tinker, leggings and dun jacket splashed with mud, a filthy robe tossed on a chair. He’d have tucked whatever coin or weapon he carried right against his skin. Jakob twisted in his seat and raised a hand, a thinner version of his older brother. “Aha,” he said. “The prodigal returns.”

  Peter forced a smile. “That was the youngest one of three, I thought.” He reached to shake his hand.

  They hadn’t seen each other for an age. Jakob had lost weight: his cheeks were sharp, his slicked-back hair gone silver-gray. Small wonder, since he sat upon the council now. His tunic bore the six-spoked wheel of Mainz, picked out in ruby thread upon his breast, a mark of rank to add to the thick ring he wore as leader of the goldsmiths’ guild on his right hand.

  “I was just telling Jakob how relieved I am to be back home.” Fust shook his neck as if to throw off the accumulated weight and reached into a cupboard for the brandy.

  “As if home is any respite,” Jakob said. His eyes were blue, like Johann’s, only milkier and paler, winter ice.

  “Trouble?” Peter asked.

  Fust shrugged. “The usual. Thieves and thugs and spies.” He poured three glasses from a crystal flask. Down on the trading floor, the goods he’d brought were being counted and taxed. Where had he been this time, what had he brought? More knotted balls of linens, lace from Ghent, the products of Parisian looms? If he had headed west, perhaps. Around the turning of the century, his grandfather had dealt in powders of all kinds: saltpeter for the men at arms, metals for the smiths, salts and roots for chemists. Johann in his turn had branched out more widely, adding semiprecious stones and manuscripts and other luxuries; he’d built an empire based on the vanity and envy of the minor nobles east of the Rhine. The German counts and margraves had little to compare with the bright baubles of their cousins on the thrones of Burgundy and Savoy, England, Scotland, and France.

  “You should have seen the Neckar surging.” Fust grinned and tossed his liquor back. “We damn near lost the load.” How pleased he seemed.

  “Heidelberg, then,” Peter said. He’d never seen the castle of the Dukes of Palatine, perched famously above that river gorge.

  “Less risky overland. Though who knows for how long.” Fust frowned, with meaning, toward his brother.

  “We’re doing all we can.” Jakob pulled his cloak up tighter. There were negotiations between Mainz and the archbishop—if one could
call them that. The situation was the same as it had always been: who could be blamed, and who would pay.

  Rebstock and Weinberg had been seized, his uncle told his father. Outside of Höchst, along the road toward Frankfurt. By whose order? Fust asked. The archdiocese. The merchants had got off with just a fine, and nothing worse—if Mainzers had been seized by Frankfurt, they’d still be rotting in its jail.

  “That’s why I took the woods.” Fust stroked his chin. “Wrecked the axles, had to pay off half the foresters.” The brothers sucked their teeth and shook their heads—like children, Peter thought, or pawns grabbed up at any point along the board. You seize me; I’ll seize you: it was a pointless game. He waited for Jakob to shut up and leave. But this was not to be.

  His uncle turned cool eyes toward him. “I hear you’re smelting after all.”

  Peter glanced at Fust, who gave a little nod. “You hear well,” he answered, keeping his voice even. The crew in that hot hell was barred from setting foot outside; they couldn’t even slake their thirst or lust among the taverns or the brothels. But somehow Jakob knew.

  “We have a certain . . . dispensation, I suppose you’d call it,” said his father, “with the guild.”

  “For now,” said Jakob.

  “I’m not much better than a fire-boy.” Peter kept his face toward Jakob. Let Fust hear what he had to say this way.

  “It is an honest calling,” his uncle answered.

  “That isn’t what I mean.” Their eyes locked; Peter saw that he had never really been forgiven. It was Jakob who had taught him how to smelt and carve—Peter and his own son Jakob the younger, and Keffer, all those half-formed boys who’d been apprenticed at his forge—though since becoming Brudermeister Jakob rarely dirtied his own hands. He was the truest son of Mainz, rooted in the Rhineland soil; he would defend her tooth and nail. He’d never understood how anyone could just pick up and go. To him departure was repudiation: he’d seen his nephew leave not once but twice, his own son taking up the stool the foster boy had shunned.

  “I told your father, and I will tell you too,” Jakob said. “This . . . ‘workshop’”—his voice curdled—“is outside the rules. The man’s an Elder, and no doubt a snake. I plan to keep the closest eye upon it.”

  Peter caught his father’s fleeting irritated look. “Why don’t you let me watch my business,” Fust said, “and you watch yours.”

  “The one destroys the other, that’s the point.” Jakob drained his glass and stood. How fitting, Peter thought, that he’d ascended to the post of city treasurer. His first act had been cancellation of the Elders’ interest payments. “They either fund the city like the rest of us and pay their tax, or they can bloody well decamp.” He turned to Peter, one hand on the doorknob. “If I were you, I’d watch my back.”

  His footsteps faded on the great stone stair. Fust snorted, slicked his hair back. “He always saw the black before the white.” He gave his son a look. “Though there is money to be made, while they are at each other’s throats.”

  Roll in the barrel, he said next; Peter fetched it through the small, arched door.

  “Something for you.” Fust grabbed a chisel from the rack. He popped the wooden lid and started drawing out the volumes he’d procured. Tomes of canon law, the decretals of Boniface and Gregory, some copies of the cruder sort of romance. And then a packet wrapped in suede: an unbound group of folded sheets, perhaps three quires. He handed it to Peter, who opened it. A calendar of saints filled the left page, in red and black; the right was blank, awaiting a fine painting. “For Duchess Mechtild,” said his father. A lovely copy of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  Peter’s body tightened. The lines of the textura hand were a rich brown, exquisite, written with a seamless grace—almost certainly the work of a Carthusian scribe. Textura meant “woven”: the monks had always said the scribe wove his own spirit into God’s.

  “What use is this to fire-boys?” Peter’s voice was harsh.

  Fust blanched; he genuinely looked surprised. “I thought you might advise me in the painting.”

  “As I had thought my life was mine.” Peter pushed the packet back across the desk.

  Fust leaned both palms against the wood and stood there looking at him a long while. At last he sat down heavily. “You have not grasped the whole of it.”

  “I grasp enough.”

  Fust frowned. “You disappoint me, Peter. You, of all people, not to see what this will be.”

  “I see a crude and ugly copy of the best that men can do. There’s not a lord alive who’ll touch a book this madman makes, you know it.”

  “Not yet.” His father’s nostrils flared. “Not yet—but give it time. You can’t imagine it, perhaps, but I can. Books everywhere, and costing less than manuscripts—in quantities that simply stun the mind. Imagine how the world would look if anyone could buy one!” His eyes fell on the book of hours. “I can’t live just off these. I sell the things, I ought to know.” He raised his eyes to Peter’s own. “In ten years, twenty, who will pay a prince’s fortune for such things? The gentry are not all as rich as that. It’s finished. I am sorry, but it’s true. Once we have found the secret to the letters, there will be no need for scribes.”

  “And everything of beauty is destroyed.” Peter rose. “Everything that matters, in the praise of God—or learning—trampled. Do not forget, I know a thing about this business too.”

  His father nodded. “Of course. You must defend your interest. Your hands, your trade, I understand. It changes nothing, though. It’s over. The life of scribes, the value in your hands—you may as well accept it now.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “Beg all you like.” Fust’s eyes went steely. “It will not change the truth—or your own duty.”

  His duty, then. It was his duty to trail Fust, like a hound, beyond St. Martin’s to the square they called the Leichhof, where the painters and the binders had their workshops. Peter’s duty, to feign courtesy at meeting this Klaus Pinzler, to marvel at his altarpieces and his scenes of noble revels painted on wood and glass. His duty, to wait as the fellow scraped and bowed and Peter gave a nod to show his brush would do. His duty and his torture to sit beside the men as they agreed on the contract, and to greet the wife and daughter as they sidled in and grinned. He watched his father ooze that bonhomie that greased the salesman’s path in life, and told himself that he would take the other way. He was Fust’s son, but not his slave. He stood as soon as it was seemly and made his excuses. The family rose as well; the daughter moved to open the low door. He noticed that her fingertips were blue, tipped still with the bright paint of some Madonna. He had a sudden, fleeting urge to wrap his hands around the slender throat; how like a beast a cornered man becomes. The hands he hid inside his cloak were hardened—almost deadened now. He would not stoop to show his father how that master had scarred him. The girl looked after him, pale, almond-eyed, without a trace of interest or pity. The last thing that he saw before he turned were three small blue-tipped fingers, disappearing as she slammed the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  SPONHEIM ABBEY

  September 1485

  MY DOUBTS were more than justified.”

  The abbot, busy writing, startles at the printer’s dry, sardonic tone. “What do you mean?” Trithemius lifts his head, and then his nib, his left hand cupped beneath.

  “You know yourself,” says Peter Schoeffer, “how little was achieved.”

  The world is flooded now with crude words crudely wrought, an overwhelming glut of pages pouring from the scores of presses springing up like mushrooms after rain. Churning out their smut and prophecy, the rantings of the anarchists and antichrists—the scholars of the classics are in uproar at how printing has defiled the book.

  “Not all is worthless, surely,” the young monk protests.

  Peter turns his face away. “Not all, but much,” he says.

  He feared it from the moment he set foot in that foul workshop—that this art haile
d as sacred would instead prove a dark art. How glorious it might have been! How tawdry it was now, a vehicle for man’s base lust for fame and greed. The printer watches with a certain pity as the abbot tries to hide his shock. This is not the proud recounting that Trithemius expected.

  “You would go back, then, to the days of scribes?” The abbot bends toward him, his face intent. “My monks here copy scripture for six hours a day, when they are not at chapel or at work. I’m still convinced it is the only way to truly learn the sacred texts, and practice pious discipline and self-denial.

  “Communion with the Word of God, engraved indelibly on heart and mind—this is what I tell them.” His eyes are wide. “The press, for all its magic, has removed that vital link.”

  “Nor did it bring the liberation that it promised.” Peter holds his eyes a moment, and then smiles. “Still, no one has yet found a way to put a genie back into a bottle.”

  All these years later, Mainz is more a vassal than before. The products of her presses are all censored and the workers’ rights curtailed. The dream was gone: that with those metal letters they might lift up man from bigotry and want and greed, and raise him page by page toward heaven’s peace and plenty.

  “The press is used for lucre now, and that I lay at Gutenberg’s own feet.”

  “How so?”

  “He was the first to turn the art to commerce. He cheapened it; he would print anything so long as someone paid him.”

  “Anything?” The abbot gives him a strange look.

  “Pamphlets, screeds, decrees, whatever raised a fee.”

  “And you do not?” Trithemius controls his voice, but Peter hears the edge.