Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie Read Free Book Online

she was to take what life dished out. He had always thought that there was more—had been lulled into believing he was destined for some higher calling.
    “I could have made him proud.” He saw himself deciding with the rector which new books were worthy of the work of copying. Composing one himself perhaps—a work of scholarship. “Now I’m to throw away my life.”
    “A life you’d not have had, except for him.” Grede looked at him, her dark head cocked. “As nor would I.”
    She too had been raised above the grinding labor of a working life. She was a furrier’s daughter, quick and fine of shape, whom Fust, then newly widowed, spied and made his second wife. Peter still remembered those first awkward months six years before, this girl his age appearing in his life. They’d circled warily, at first, but found with time that they were much alike.
    “So we are to be forever grateful?” Peter sneered.
    “He said he’d only do this, with this man, if he was sure he had someone there he could trust. He’s gone too much, he needs somebody on the spot. There’s too much hanging on it.” She looked at him with the frank, clear gaze he’d come to know in all those times that Fust was on the road—Peter writing when the day was done, Grede always stitching, laughing, telling stories by the fire. “He needs a surety, a pair of trusted eyes.”
    So Peter was not simply drudge, he realized, but spy.
    That master worked them fourteen hours a day each cursed day of every week. Sweating, stoking, crushing, pouring. They did not even get a pause to celebrate the Sabbath; despite a host of meetings between clergymen and council, Archbishop Dietrich’s ban remained in place. The one brute fact was work, and then dead sleep, as if the pope himself colluded with this Master Gutenberg.
    They cast no letters for the whole first month. Instead they smelted, wreathed in noxious smokes, to try to find a metal alloy that would hold. They stooped around the forge like witches, eyes red-rimmed, hands black, their faces draped in clotted veils. Peter ground the ores to powders and shoved them deep into the coals. Lead, tin, bismuth, iron, copper: it was his job to win the molten metal from the roaring fire, turn the dull earth into a shiny, deadly fluid. The master then would reach a claw, take out some drops to mix inside a beaker; he’d growl amounts that Peter noted on a parchment. The tests went on, each mixture entered in the scribe’s firm hand. Two of this , the master muttered. Four of that. Gutenberg would swirl the stinking streams together, lips drawn up, dashing the sweat from his long nose. Throw that slop out. Another drop. Ah yes, perhaps. He’d glance up, grimace, hand the beaker off to Hans.
    Hans poured it in the casting box and counted up to ten, then Keffer drew the cast letter from the mold. They craned to see. Sometimes the alloy hardened before it even left the beaker, other times it did not harden fast enough. The hollows in the mold might fill right up, but then the metal would disintegrate or snap when Keffer tried to draw it out. Each time the master scowled and pulled at his lip, and sat back down.
    For all this time he took no notice of his new apprentice, standing silently at his right hand. It seemed to Peter that he had no eyes for any living man. He would mutter to himself, or raise his head and snarl. By the blood of the saints. Cannot a runt among you fix a spoon? He did not eat unless Frau Beildeck brought the dishes to the workbench; he bent so low above the molten metal that great gobs of it adhered, then hardened, in his beard. It seemed to Peter that he sucked up every breath of air in that hot room.
    The others laughed at Peter when he washed his hands before the midday meal. They laughed louder when he dried them off and worked some tallow into his chapped skin. Both Hans and Konrad had come from Strassburg with the master and spoke mainly to each other in their strange Alsatian twang.