Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel by Christie Alix

Author:Christie, Alix [Christie, Alix]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Each piece of type by then had gone beneath the press some thirty, forty times. The faces had begun to chip, the edges wear. The first they cast had never been that sharp to start with. There came a day when Hans decreed they had to stop and melt them down, and cast some more. The master was in Strassburg to recruit, and Hans was still the foreman. He kept Mentelin at setting type, to feed one press; the others gladly spent the hours beside the forge. It was remarkable, how lightly they all worked without the master breathing fire. Each man was part, and yet apart, responsible for his own task—just like the scribes who penned the students’ books in sections. Peter thought a great deal in those days of that whole world he’d left behind. Anna did not notice any difference in him; it pained him, even as he hid his real life from her. The falsehood roiled within him, as it must have twisted inside Peter, his disciple, on the morning of Christ’s death, when three times he denied Him. How practiced he was now at lies, thought Peter Schoeffer, tossing on his narrow bed at night.

The peaceful interlude was broken when the master came back unannounced one early February afternoon. Some of the men were seated, stirring; Peter cast with Götz; the boys were grinding ores. All froze the moment he stepped in.

“A pretty picture,” he said, stomping off the snow. “Though I don’t hear two presses going.” He had a youth with him, apparently the latest hire.

“We needed letters.” Hans wiped his hands and went toward him.

“I left you stocked.”

“They were too battered.” Peter stood.

“If I paid you men to think, I’d pay you more.” He cast them his disgusted scowl and went to count the finished piles. “That’s it? Good Christ.” He jerked a thumb toward the youth. “You’d better learn him quick.” Ruppel knocked the lad a stool and case; Hans and Peter quietly conferred. They’d have to cast the extra letters for this new man after hours, Hans said, or Gutenberg would burst a vein for certain.

Peter looked across the room and saw the way exhaustion dogged the master, too. His face was gray, his skin stretched thin and folded at the turned-down corners of his mouth. It was fatigue so deep it went right to the bone: Peter knew that feeling. He didn’t think enough, though, at the time, about those trips Gutenberg made, nor ask himself how they had added to the strain. The man did not divulge whom he had gone to see or what he did—he simply disappeared, then reappeared days later, grayer, sharper, more irate. At the time they chalked it up to their excruciating, crawling progress—and then the ghastly inverse speed with which the costs increased. The master wore the proof on his face: that long, dark beard, which in six months had turned to pewter, gray mixed in with anthracite and white.

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