Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

MAP

DEDICATION

In memoriam

Lester Lloyd

James Robertson

Master printers

EPIGRAPH

For there is nothing hid, which shall not be made manifest: neither was it made secret, but that it may come abroad.

—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK, 4:21

In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

—WALTER ISAACSON, Steve Jobs: A Biography

CONTENTS

Map

Dedication

Epigraph

Sponheim Abbey, Germany

Genesis

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Exodus

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Numbers

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Letters

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Revelation

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Afterword

Acknowledgments

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . *

About the author

About the book

Read on

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

SPONHEIM ABBEY, GERMANY

September 1485

MANY YEARS AFTERWARD, when Abbot Trithemius first asked him to recall the true beginnings of the glorious art of printing, Peter Schoeffer refused. The story was too private, he informed the abbot, and not really his.

Exactly so. No man invents alone! Creation is the Lord’s own province. The monk, with a wide smile, was pitching toward his guest. It follows that the man who made this miracle was touched by God.

He’s young—too young to be the abbot of this hilltop cloister, master of a vaulted study lined with books whose brass clasps shimmer in the golden autumn light. Nor does Peter Schoeffer like the glint of satisfaction in his eyes. Although he knows why it is there: Trithemius has netted him at last, has drawn the celebrated printer up to his own abbey after many tries.

I plan to write it all, the abbot says, and lifts an arm to circumscribe the library, the thick stone keep, the Rhineland down below. A chronicle of all that has transpired here in this blessed time. None of more import, surely, than this great invention in which you, sir, played a part.

He uses me to make his reputation, Peter thinks. Is this how chronicles are made, the story told to those who’d make their name by those whom time and fate have unaccountably left standing?

On his way into the abbey he and the abbot wove through courtyards past the chapel, to the open cloister walk where even now the monks sit writing, backs bent, desks positioned to receive the slanting harvest sun. How long it’s been, Peter remarked, surprised, since he has seen a group of Benedictine brothers in such busy, scratching rows. Once every cloister of the great monastic orders had scriptoria where God’s Word flowed from hand to parchment, but hardly any now survive.

The abbot did not even break his stride. They curse me for it, he said with a tight smile, and protest that the printing press should spare them this hard drudgery.

Peter has brought books from his own press to give to Sponheim, mainly standard works of liturgy and law. His thoughts have started turning to the prayers the monks will say in thanks when his soul nears its time. Trithemius receives these printed volumes greedily, though his own shelves are filled with handwork of the scribes. He strokes their leather bindings, and fixes Peter once again with his light, intense eyes.

You are the only one who knows the truth, now that both Johanns have been called home to God.

Johann Gutenberg, he means, and Johann Fust.

Peter Schoeffer’s mind is clear, his fingers as strong as they have ever been. He’s over sixty now, a father to four sons, and the wealthy founder of the greatest printing house in all of Germany. A lean, tall man, he wears a close-cropped silver beard on his narrow, sober face.

The truth. He smiles.

Much has been said in the decades since, but almost none of it is true. They’ve practically canonized the man who found this wondrous art. How Gutenberg would laugh if he could see them from above . . . or else below. The final disposition of the master’s soul is far from certain.

They say he died in penury, abandoned and betrayed. The abbot’s voice turns hard.

Well Peter Schoeffer knows the charge: that it was he and Fust, his foster father, who wrenched the Bible workshop from the master and robbed him of his whole life’s work. For years he’s borne the slander of this heinous accusation.

It is a lie. His voice is clipped. He died a member of Archbishop Adolf’s court, highly praised and well attended.

While your own firm went on and prospered.

Success, dear brother, is no crime. He gives the monk a piercing look. Betrayals there were, certainly—but not how people think.

Then there’s a tale to tell, indeed.

The abbot moves toward the window, where he stays a moment lost in—or feigning—thought. His plain black habit hangs on his large frame like fabric on a birdcage.

We have a duty, don’t you think? Trithemius looks back. A duty to the past, and to the future?

Though more than thirty years have passed, Peter is loath to blacken the master’s name. Deep down, he still must love the madman, Gutenberg, that burning, brutal genius who tore down as much as he created—who took the credit, always, regardless of whether it was due. He conceived the craft and forged the metal letters before anybody else, this none could reasonably deny. But without Peter and his father, that great Bible would never have been made.

Think of the ark of history. The abbot tries a different tack. "Does not the great vault of historia contain all past and present and the whole created world? Is not each word, each action that we take, therefore a part, however small, of the vast architecture of God’s plan?"

Trithemius has a domed forehead and unblinking eyes. He’s confident, wellborn, without a doubt—and the same age that Peter was when it began, with that same burning drive. Peter searches in the corners of the memory palace in his mind. God’s vault is vaster, and by far: he’s always pictured it a nave that fills the sky.

He once believed that what they did would lift them higher, ever higher—he sensed the godliness that flows throughout Creation brush them. Until it cracked, and their whole workshop filled with anger and recriminations. With each succeeding year Peter has seen the world become unhinged, cacophonous, the very earth stunned by the pounding of machines. And he’s begun to wonder if God did not unleash some darker force with that great shining net of words.

He’s never wanted to expose the master, not out loud. He’s prayed for years to find forgiveness in his heart. But deep inside he still blames Gutenberg for how it all came crashing down. He scratches at his beard. Trithemius is right. Posterity should know the truth; the world should know the role he and Fust played.

The abbot sits and reaches for a reed.

A tool—that’s how the master saw him at the end. Yet which among them is not the Master Craftsman’s tool? Peter feels a sudden lightness, like a bubble rising through a molten mass. He’ll tell it as he can. With modesty, he prays: God knows he’s struggled all his life against the sin of pride.

It may take many visits, he says, rising in his turn and looking out on the fading orchard, the mottled auburn hills that step down to the valley far below.

Who can say if what they made will prove a force for good or ill? God alone can know. To pretend otherwise is to presume to know His mind. Yet isn’t that just what they did in those few heady years, inflamed by ardor, hubris, youth? Imagined that the three of them with their own newfound art could rise as high?

"Historia. He nods. All right. Perhaps you’ll find a way, where I have not, to spy the meaning that the Lord inscribed."

GENESIS

CHAPTER 1

MAINZ, GERMANY

September 1450

I WAS TWENTY-FIVE the year my father called me home." So it began. The letter was delivered to the workshop on the rue des Écrivains, where he sat copying some proofs of Aristotle. It did not state the reason why. His father just reached out his merchant’s hand and plucked Peter up, as if he were a number to be transferred from one column to the other in his fat brown ledger. From Paris, back to Mainz: Peter felt the sting of it the whole three days it took to cross the flat French plain and sweep home down the Rhine.

Stepping on the market boat at Strassburg, he tried to calm his mind—just wipe it clean, the way he’d scrape and chalk a parchment. He’d learned this discipline from monks some years before: to steady first his breath, his pulse, and then his fingers and his eyes, to join the text he copied and his nib in one taut line. At least it was a blessing to escape that stinking, jolting coach. He gripped the railing, filled his lungs, and faced downstream.

The ship was weighted low with cargo; passengers who had no railing clung to staves nailed to the central hold. They were mere specks upon the river rushing toward the sea. The vessel pitched and rolled, and he could feel the shiver of that mighty force beneath his feet. The river seemed to fling him backward, down, with every bend that hauled him closer to his home.

When he was young, he’d thought the Rhine ships looked like ladies’ slippers: flat and low along the prow, then rising aft to curl like some outlandish petal at the captain’s back. He’d been a boy the last time he saw these shores. Yet he returned now as a man—a man of letters, a clericus, a scribe. He bore the tools of his profession in a pouch slung like a quiver at his side: the sealed horn of ink, his quills and reeds, his bone and chalk and chamois.

The valley of the Rhine peeled off to either side in banks of green and gold, and farther up outcroppings rose, perched high above the river like so many gnomes. An ancient peaty smell mingled sickeningly with the pomades and the late-September sweat of bodies crammed together at the rail. All he knew was that the matter was urgent. His father would not have called him back to celebrate the birth of his new son, although a child this late in life was wondrous news. Nor was he likely to have picked Peter a wife. First get yourself established, Johann Fust had always said, and then you’ll have your choice of brides. The only clue lay in a postscript in his looping hand: I’ve met a most amazing man.

The Seine had smelled of chalk and stone, a sharp and thrilling city striving. The Rhine was wider, darker, rooted in the forest and the field. Peter breathed in its odor, the odor he had known most of his life. They were not far from Gernsheim now, where he’d been born and raised and tended sheep. Where he’d been orphaned, and then saved. Fleetingly he saw the farm, and Father Paul. He never would forget the old priest’s palsied paw, and then his own small fist, tracing out his letters in fulfilment of his mother’s dying wish. He looked down at that very hand clamped now upon the railing—that hand that was the master of a dozen scripts. It was a perfect tool: with it he stood, at the Sorbonne, right at the apex of the world.

And what a world it was! Even decades later he could taste the feeling of that year of Jubilee. The Holy Roman Empire pulsed like a rich man with a fever, fearful yet exalted at the prospect of the light. All Christendom hung in the balance, waiting. There was a new pope on Saint Peter’s throne, and some strange new spirit rising. The schism of three popes had been laid to rest; the cardinals had bowed at last to the authority of Rome. The new Italian pontiff, Nicholas V, had vowed to sweep the vile world clean. He’d called his Jubilee to bring the faithful back to penitence, and undo years of plunder, ruled by greed.

That new wind was sweeping through the markets and the lecture halls, the streets and seats of learning from Bologna up to Paris. It licked around the stools where new men labored at their quills, copying the texts that fed the best minds in the western world. That wind had swept in masses of new students, lifted by prosperity and trade, all avid for their chance; it threw the scribes together in long ranks, writing madly to keep up with the demand. He’d felt the force of it up his own arm, lifting his eyes to heights he’d never dreamed, for he was one of these new men, these scholar-scribes.

And then the wind stalled, stopped short by the thick brown band of the Rhine. Peter watched the other trading boats, as thick as krill upon the water. Merchants, moneylenders, bureaucrats, and priests, all servants of Mammon as much as of God. He knew for certain that the winds of change were dead upon these shores when in the afternoon their boat put in to Speyer. He hung back when the passengers leapt off; he’d spied some merchants friendly with his father he would have to greet if he were seen. Instead he hung about the pilings, watching as the docker swung the crane and dug it deep into the bank.

He’d brought only what little he could carry, including a new manuscript of Cicero he had just started when the summons came. The rest he’d left behind in Paris as a kind of charm. His father could not mean he had to stay in Mainz. Not after all that Peter had achieved: his rapid rise through the ranks, his luck at being chosen not a month before to represent the workshop to the rector of the university. He wrote these extra books at night, to earn the coins for things his father’s stipend did not cover and he’d rather not reveal. The manuscript, and ten blank sets of pages, he had packed inside a barrel from the family trading firm. Cicero, On Moral Duties. Oh, the parallel was rich: the great man’s lectures to his son. It floated with him now, lashed to the others in the hold, the vellum snug inside its curly nest of shavings.

At least, that’s where he had last seen it stowed. Until, with shock, he saw his small brown cask tossed up and lashed onto the massive hook that swung the goods to shore. He leapt and shouted, waved his arms. The docker hauled on the rope. The barrel bore the mark of Mainz, he grunted. And no goods could transit in or out of Mainz these past three weeks, since the archbishop slapped the city with the unholy ban.

What ban? His father’s friends were at his back then, breathing sourly. Leave it, Widder hissed, or you will never see it back. The barrel branded Brothers Fust sailed slowly through the sky. Don’t get much news, I guess, up there in Paris? An elbow dug into his side. Excommunication was Archbishop Dietrich’s favorite means of brandishing his fist; he would shut a city in his diocese for weeks and sometimes months if local councils tried to cut into his power or his revenues.

The captain blew his whistle and the passengers all piled back on, propelling Peter forward on that rank and jostling tide. He was wedged in, hauled back, no better than a shipping cask. Three years he’d been away, by God, and not a bloody thing had changed.

As they gained speed, he prayed that he might soon escape this spent and feuding place. He bent his body with the current as the river coiled itself past Gernsheim, looped three times like some gigantic spring, then shot the boat that bore him up the few remaining miles.

The city looked the same. Not battered in the least, though he had heard enough in transit to conclude that Mainz was in extremis. She still stood proud upon the bank, an island girded by a high white wall, tipped red and blue as if by an illuminator’s brush. The ship moved slowly past the vineyards of the abbeys that encroached upon her southern door like fattened bishops. Across the river to the right, a smaller, muddy mouth drained from the Hessian plain. The cathedral city of the archbishopric of Mainz sat just astride the confluence of Rhine and Main.

The foreshore that late afternoon seemed drained of life. Out of instinct Peter raised his eyes to check the color of the sky. The Iron Gate would soon be shut. The day’s last stream of men and carts was toiling up the rocks, and he scrambled to join in, feet sinking into brackish sand. Up close the mighty wall was flaking, puckered at the massive hinges like a toothless hag. Beneath the arch he kissed his palm and touched it to the city seal. A dogleg left and right, and he was on the square they called the Brand, and home.

It was strangely quiet as he stood there, tensing and untensing his long hands. Drays waiting for unloading stood before the Kaufhaus, the huge customs hall. Horses stamped, the starlings wheeled, yet over everything there hung a pall. His eyes went to the jerking clock hands on the tallest spire, the red cathedral of St. Martin’s. He waited until they stood in a straight line. They clicked, the mechanism cracking sharply in the silence. No bells. In all those forty churches, he could hear no bells. The archbishop’s ban was just another sharp reminder of who really held the reins, his father’s friends had said. The workingmen had won the city council and tried to halt the years of plunder by the ruling Elder clans. But when the council would not pay the interest that those clans demanded on the sweetheart deals they’d engineered, the old guard simply called in Archbishop Dietrich’s fist. It was the same old litany of greed, the grappling for power in this backwater that history had left behind. Peter turned and struck across the square toward the Haus zur Rosau.

His father’s house was not the grandest of all the timbered merchant homes that ringed the Brand. Yet it was imposing, like the man himself: broad and solid with an unexpected grace inside. Its floors were of blue slate, its yellow walls warmed by new tapestries from France and Flanders—though in the heat of this late summer these were rolled away, the window gaps all hung with gauze.

His foster father had the big man’s way of crushing those he loved against the ample shelf that was his stomach. And then he held Peter at arm’s length. At last. He smiled.

You knew full well which boat I would be on.

Yet still I watched for every one. Johann Fust had eyes as blue as Mary’s vestments in a face that with the years and success had reddened and filled. One eye winked.

Then you’ll have noticed I come empty-handed. Peter rolled his eyes.

They stopped you then? At Speyer?

You might have warned me.

His father squeezed his shoulder. Nothing that a shilling in a palm won’t fix. What matters is that you’re home. Fust turned as Grede stepped out into the hall. His father’s wife looked wan, but on her lips still played the wry smile she had always worn. Wonder of wonders. She turned her cheek to his. I’d given up all hope you’d see your brother before he could hold a stylus.

I left the Palace of the Louvre in some despair. He grinned and bowed, raking the floor with one limp hand. To grace ye people in your humble homes.

She laughed. And yet his father’s bright young bride—his second, and a kind of sister to Peter—appeared exhausted: as if, having survived once more the terror of the childbirth bed, she had at last left youth behind. She had not looked this way when she bore Christina five years before.

They went on to the big front room and stopped before a cradle. Fust took the bundle in his arms. We call him Henchin. Little Hans, he said with unmasked pride. The baby yawned, its face scrunched up like an old wizened apple. Its eyes flew open, blue as those that gazed in wonderment down on them. Peter put a finger to the tiny fist, and bent to kiss the tiny head. He’d never had a sister or a brother who shared his own blood; his mother died in bearing him. He’d been saved, adopted into this fine house, by her first cousin, Fust’s first wife. Gently he unwound the little clinging fingers. He’d grown to manhood in these walls. But this in no way meant he held a claim against this little red-faced chap—only because of his late arrival had Peter been welcomed years before into this house.

All through the meal that followed Peter watched his father, hoping for some sign. Grede had put out beeswax candles and her prized Venetian glass. The cook had made roast lamb, potatoes, chard, some fowl baked in a pie. They’d wash it down with Rheingau from St. Jakob’s vines. Peter had brought gifts: a calfskin workbook for Tina, five by now and as primped and blond as any cherub, and a baby’s beechwood game of catch-a-bob. The servants filed in silently as Fust stood, leafing with a frown through a worn pocket Bible. A reading from Saint Matthew, he said finally, and cleared his throat. Whose birth we honor in these days.

Peter caught Grede’s eye. Since when did Fust say blessings at the table? The ban, she mouthed back, nostrils flaring. Dietrich backed his own class, naturally; the lower orders might pretend to rule, but they would have to fall in line. There’d be no sacraments until the upstart council had backed down. The archbishop’s word was law: none of his priests would say a mass or take confession; the newly born were unbaptized and the dying were deprived of their last rites, consigned forever to the agony of limbo. Grede’s face was dark with anger.

You have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other; And if a man will contend with thee in judgment, and take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him.

Fust looked up and fixed his elder son with shining eyes.

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love your neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

The assembled foreheads flickered in the candlelight. Fust bowed his large and white-fringed head. Had he chosen that passage just for him? Peter wondered. It wouldn’t be the first time. He tried and failed to catch Fust’s gaze. What message did his father mean to send? Acceptance of injustice, and the stilling of one’s own desires? Impatience flooded him as he stood waiting, willing Fust to make the meaning of this journey clear.

Though we may chafe, let’s not forget the wisdom of the scriptures. Fust signaled for the wine. Nor, on this joyous day when Peter has returned, dwell overmuch on persecution. The fathers of the church were far more persecuted in their time.

He smiled and raised his goblet to toast Peter. And Peter, chilled, raised his. How should he not? He owed Fust everything. He could not see into the merchant’s heart, yet he could guess what Fust saw every time he looked at Peter: the boy he’d raised, the life he’d forged, the skills and travels he’d unstintingly bestowed. The life of mud and dung from which he’d raised the grubby offspring of his first wife’s cousin. A line appeared in Peter’s mind, as fresh as if old Cicero had penned it just that instant: There is no more essential duty than returning kindness.

Words of guidance, penned in deep antiquity and carried forward through the long, dark centuries by Christian scribes.

The feast of Saint Matthew is auspicious for all business ventures. Fust’s teeth were gleaming in the torchlight. Peter waited, long legs stretched out from the willow chair. The heat of the day had left the air of the courtyard warm and scented by the rose, and from the lane beyond he smelled the tang of fruit, the thick hot earthiness of livestock. He heard the call of owls, the intermittent roar out of the gaming house—those old, familiar sounds.

What do you mean? he asked, when Fust did not continue.

Just that I have a proposition. His father sat upright.

Which I may not refuse. And this is why you called me back.

We have a chance to shape the future. Fust leaned forward, peering at him in the dusk. You and I together, I mean.

I shape the future now, said Peter, straightening.

Not quite like this.

I haven’t had a chance to write to tell you—Peter spoke as though he hadn’t heard—that I’ve been asked to join the rector’s office at the university.

Ah, said Fust.

Imagine how the trade could benefit, his son went on. I’ll see them first, whichever titles he selects. We’ll know exactly what the market will demand.

The last time Fust passed through Paris, he’d asked his son to act as scout: to scour the stalls where books were sold across from Notre Dame, to keep his ears pricked and so learn the titles that the firm might sell to buyers east of the Rhine. Peter, meanwhile, toured him through the scribal workshop, one of dozens serving that great university. He showed him all the stacks of sections—written out by hand, then lent to students who would write out their own copies—hundreds of them, not only by the Greeks and Romans but the greatest scholars of the day: Duns Scotus, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas. Those ink-stained scribes were like a mighty army, Fust had marveled, ranks of angels on the move.

You said you envied me, when you last came to Paris.

That’s true. His father pulled the flesh beneath his chin. But that was all before I met this man.

This ‘most amazing man.’ Peter made no attempt to disguise his scorn.

Look first. His father reached into his lap, brought out a set of folded sheets, and laid them on the table. Just look. And then I think you’ll understand.

The quire—five folded, nested sheets—was of parchment of middling quality. Part of a schoolbook, judging by its short, square shape. Peter recognized at once the Latin grammar of Donatus: he had written out those declensions a thousand times. A common, tawdry work; he looked up, horrified.

Feel, his father said, and flipped the booklet to its last, blank page. He lifted Peter’s finger, rubbed it lightly on the empty space.

He felt a stippling, a kind of roughness on the hide. As if the parchment maker had not scraped the skin entirely smooth. He rubbed two fingers, three, and all at once they sensed a strange, sharp symmetry. He flipped the page back to its written side. His blood jumped then, his palms grew damp. The textura lettering was squat and ugly, yet every string of letters was unnervingly even, all across the line. Each of those lines ended with an utter, chilling harmony, at precisely the same distance from the edge. What hand could write a line that straight, and end exactly underneath the one above? What human hand could possibly achieve a thing so strange? He felt his heart squeeze and his soul flood with an overwhelming dread.

You see now. Why I had to call you back. Fust’s voice was high.

What work is this? What hand did this?

No hand. His father took his fingertip again. Feel how it sinks? The way the ink lies not on top, but in a hollow in the skin?

Peter closed his eyes to sense it more precisely. It was as Fust had said. The parchment yielded in some way: it was not smooth beneath the ink, as when he wrote it with his pen. Whose work is this? he said again.

Fust’s heavy face was shining. This man they call Gutenberg has found a way to make the letters out of metal. He lays the ink upon each one, then stamps them in the page.

Peter raised it to his eyes. So close that he could see the faint depression, a slope so slight as to be almost imperceptible: from the surface to the gully of each stroke. The space in which the angels—or the devil, surely—danced upon a pin. He could not speak at first, the shock was so extreme.

I was approached by a man who knew I dealt in books. His father mopped his brow, as if relieved to share this thing at last. Gutenberg sought an investor, I was told. I went to see him, and he showed me this. The man wouldn’t show him more, though, he told Peter, nor divulge how it was done. For his part, he’d been mystified, he added: he had never heard of any Elder family having anything to do with books. He’d thought that man’s whole clan content with running half the abbeys and the Mint, and weaving gold from wholesale cloth they sold beneath St. Martin’s eaves.

I thought, like you, he said as he pressed Peter’s hand, "that it was just another of those wretched grammars. But then this Gutenberg said he made it with a new technique. Ars impressoria, he calls it. To think he’s been at work at this, in secret, just a lane or two away. . . .

You know the house. Peter heard the words dimly through the roaring in his brain. The Hof zum Gutenberg, on Cobblers’ Lane.

I have a trade, he said thickly and flung the sheets back on the table.

But Fust by then was standing, pacing, giving not the slightest indication he had heard. It’s not the evenness—that’s just one part of it! His voice was high; his cheeks were flushed. He had a canny and familiar look on his trader’s face—yet also a strange expression Peter didn’t think he’d ever seen. A kind of ravishment, an exaltation. Fust turned and fired a question. It would take you how long—four days, five?—to copy this?

Two days. At most. Peter was fast, and young, and proud.

In those two days, this Gutenberg can make, by ‘printing,’ as he calls it, half a dozen copies, each one perfectly alike. Fust came around the table and reached for Peter’s wrist. Without the need to wear your fingers to the bone.

His son was pinned, immobile. Fust loomed above him, blocking out the bright stars in the sky.

Imagine it! My God, you have to see what this will mean. We can make ten times, twenty times as many copies of a book—in the same time and at the same cost. His father’s hands were flailing in the air. A book like this—or even longer ones. It’s limitless. The look of wonder was replaced by triumph. He dropped a hand on Peter’s shoulder and shook him hard. The moment I saw it, I was certain. This is the miracle the Lord has been preparing for us all along.

A blasphemy, more like, or just some shoddy trick. Peter shook Fust’s hand off, reached back for the printed sheets. In truth that booklet was a soulless, lousy thing. The letters were as rough as those cheap woodcarvings that the Dutchmen hawked; the lines were blotchy and the edges slopped with ink.

Fust darkened. Then he straightened, and wiped a hand across his face. But you must see. It is no accident that brought you here. Each step that brought you to this house, each book we’ve seen and sold, or that you yourself have written. What were they all, if not a preparation? What is our purpose here, if not for you to learn this blessed art?

Blessed? Peter jerked his hand; the pamphlet dropped. He stood and pushed the chair away. This is no art. Who is the scribe here, you or I? He shook his head. I am a master of this art, as you well know. I have a trade, a life.

You’ve had your wander years. His father’s voice was curt. They’ve gone on long enough. I need you here. His feet were planted and his look severe.

You’d keep me here? It came out as a bleat.

I shouldn’t even have to ask.

Peter felt his face flame up. And still he twisted, scrabbling for a handhold. I never heard of any Elder lifting up a tool. What proof have you that this man Gutenberg has even made this in the way you say?

The thing could easily have been a carved wood plate, as crude as any made to crank out images of saints and the few letters of their names.

I am told that a goldsmith does the carving and the casting of the metal shapes.

A smith. The very word was leaden. Fust had tried once already to make a smith of him, a goldsmith like his uncle Jakob, and their father before that—and when that didn’t take, a merchant or a lawyer. But Peter had found a trade all his own and had excelled. Must Fust now snatch it all away?

His father had lent this man vast sums. Now he would lend him his own son. Not his only begotten, though, Peter thought, the anger surging. He was no longer that.

Do it, his father said. For me.

Peter heard the words of Jesus, on that dreadful eve. Do this, in memory of me.

It is a shock, I know. Fust’s voice was gruff. But at least try to see. This is the change for which I’ve prayed.

A man would leave a legacy, Peter heard him say. The feeling that his sojourn on this earth was not for naught. The words, however well meant, rose and circled like a noose around his throat.

Will you not let me choose? he whispered, already knowing.

Fust held his eyes for a long moment. I think that God has long since chosen for us both.

The Hof zum Gutenberg backed onto the Cobblers’ Lane and looked out on its parish church, St. Christopher’s, atop a knoll that banked down steeply