by Tom Harper
The current carried me far downriver until I came to a place where it eased into a broad bend. There, on the near shore, I saw the glow of lamplight. It was almost too late. I had sunk into a cold stupor: I might never have roused myself. But I owed it to Kaspar to stay alive. With the last of my strength I splashed to the shore and waded through the shallows until I found a place where cattle had trodden a ramp in the riverbank. I crawled up it and sprawled in the mud.
‘Is there somewhere we can print this out?’
Nick’s fingers felt arthritic, the sinews in his wrists knotted from the battle. He looked up from the computer. Sabine was standing in the door, breathing hard.
‘Your machine’s already connected to the printer in my office.’
Nick clicked the button. He pushed back the chair, but Emily was already standing.
‘I’ll go.’
Sabine pointed to an office across the hall. She let Emily past and leaned against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest.
‘Who was that guy – the black knight?’
‘You saw him?’ Nick’s head was pounding like a drum; the merest twitch of his eyes drew stabs of pain in his temples.
Sabine turned her body and lifted her right arm slightly. For the first time, Nick noticed the tattoo on her bare shoulder. A giant fish eagle, wings back and talons bared.
‘Randall told me to look out for you.’
‘Thanks.’ He pushed his memory stick into the computer and copied the file across. He hadn’t even looked at it yet. ‘If you hadn’t saved me we’d have lost everything. Whatever it is we got.’
‘Nick?’ Emily pushed past Sabine back into the room. She looked dazed. Her hand trembled as she put down the printout.
‘I know what Gillian found.’
LVIII
Near Strassburg
I knelt in the chapel and prayed. Candles burned in every alcove, flickering off the painted ranks of saints and prophets on the walls. In the dome of the apse, above the altar, Christ stared down at me clutching an enormous open book against his chest. I could not look at him without weeping.
Miracles had occurred that night, though more would be needed before dawn. The cattle who trod the path to the river belonged to a monastery whose light I had seen from the river. Somehow in the dark I had staggered across the field to the gates. At first they would not open them: they thought it was an Armagnak ruse – and certainly I must have seemed a wretched, crazed creature to appear before them so late. At last my desperation convinced them. All their cells were full, so they brought me to the chapel.
Incense lingered in the air from the previous night’s vespers. Soon it would be dawn and the monks would return for matins. For now, I was alone.
I prayed. I prayed as I had not prayed since I was a boy, when I still thought I had a soul worth saving. I prayed with every ounce of my being. I emptied my self and made it a vessel for God. I despised every sin I had ever committed. I begged forgiveness. I renounced all evil. Henceforth I would live a blameless life. If only God would rescue Kaspar.
But I was a feeble vessel, cracked and riddled with holes. As hard as I poured in my prayers they spilled out. In the stillness of the chapel, other thoughts seeped in. My past flowed through me.
A blind man in Paris. Do you know what the Stone really is? It is medicine, a tonic for all the diseased matter of this world.
Nicholas, sitting at his desk in a bare room. You do not desert me, but guard me at every turn with the most tender care.
At the front of the church stood a lectern. The panoply of creation was carved into its stem, striving to ascend it: from flowers and beasts at the base, through men to the four angels who supported the great Bible spread open on their shoulders.
I walked around to look at it. Each page was the size of a gravestone, written in an outsized hand that even the blindest monk could read by candlelight. There were few of the ornaments and embellishments that would have delighted Kaspar. This was an austere beauty.
I screwed my eyes shut and touched my finger to a random part of the page. I prayed God would speak to me, show me words of comfort and hope. I looked to see what I had chosen.
‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already were kindled.’
The words offered no comfort. But in my despair, what enraged me most was not the cruelty of the words but the error in the text: ‘were already were’. It mocked me. How I could I find solace in God’s perfection, when a mere slip of the scribe’s pen could corrupt it? I stared at the writing, so clean and bold and neat and wrong. I thought of the impressions from my copper plates: messy and ragged, sometimes barely legible, but pure in meaning.
I gazed up at the Christ and wondered what was written in His book. More memories spoke inside me.
The mint master, earnestly trying to impress my father. Each must be exactly the same, or all would be worthless.
Nicholas again: Diversity leads to error, and error to sin.
Kaspar: You were an artist; now you are a moneychanger.
I knew why the mistake in the Bible offended me. It was me. My soul was a book, dictated by God but so corrupted by copyists’ errors as to be meaningless.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
The Word was God; the Word was perfect. I was a miserable creature, as far from the Word as the stars from the sea.
The full compass of my wickedness overwhelmed me. I had never felt so wretched. I felt every one of my sins like hard pustules erupting from my skin. I fell prostrate on the floor. The poison rushed out of me and I vomited; even when my stomach was empty I could not stop, but convulsed with dry heaves until the last drop was squeezed out of my bones.
I lay on the floor, gasping and moaning. Out of the depths I called to God. He answered. In that chapel, with Christ looking down, I comprehended the eternal. My whole body trembled with the resonance. The book of my being broke into the words that formed it; the words into letters; the letters into the impressions of the sharp chisel that first made them. In an instant, I was transported back from the farthest wastes of the world and reconciled to God.
Glowing threads stretched out from the candles and spiralled around me. They wrapped me in bands of light. They whispered warm words in my soul. I was forgiven. The worm, the demon who had inhabited me so long, was banished. His shrivelled corpse lay on the floor amid the bile and poison.
I had always been with God, but in my sin I had not known Him. I had sensed him my whole life, had pursued Him even when I did not know it. The principle of perfection, the unity of all things. One God. One faith. One perfect substance in the universe.
God is perfect form in which all differences are united.
I would take lead and change it. I would melt it, stir it and reshape it. I would coat it with oils and squeeze it out. I would transform it from base metal into the very word of God.
You alloy it with the Stone, so that the seeds imprisoned in the metal blossom, until in the unity of perfection it can take any shape you command.
I would redeem the gross imperfections of my soul.
Not for wealth or riches, but to perfect the universe.
LIX
Karlsruhe
The night still hadn’t broken. The darkness was absolute as they hurried outside and crossed the car park. The car was an old Volkswagen Golf, the side panels bashed and dented, the roof hooded in two inches of snow. They waited while Sabine scraped the windscreen, then longer still while she nursed the cold engine into life. The tailpipe spluttered and belched fumes. Sabine hopped out of the driver’s seat and gestured Nick to get in.
‘Take it.’
Nick started. ‘What about you?’
‘I can have a ride with my boyfriend. For now, it’s better for me to stay here – make sure they cannot trace you.’
Nick thought of Brother Jerome and shook his head. ‘You’ve done enough for us already. If you think the black knight
was scary online, you really don’t want to meet him in person. These guys are vicious. Half the people who’ve helped us in the last week have ended up dead.’
‘Now you tell me.’ Sabine gave a tight smile. ‘My boyfriend’s parents have a cabin in the Black Forest. I can stay there a while maybe.’
‘Be careful,’ said Nick.
‘You too. And bring back the car, OK?’
‘I’ll even give you a full tank of gas.’
Nick slid behind the wheel. Emily got in the other side, then leaned over from the passenger seat. ‘Is there a library on campus?’
Sabine pointed to a round building on the far side of a soccer field. ‘It’s open all the time.’
‘Thanks for everything.’
Nick put the car in gear. He almost stalled twice on his way out of the car park, fishtailed on a patch of ice at the gate and regained control just in time to avoid smacking into a lamp post. He checked the rear-view mirror and hoped Sabine hadn’t thought better of her offer.
‘What was that about the library?’ he asked.
‘I need to check something out.’ The hard edge in Emily’s voice discouraged Nick from arguing. He was too tired anyway – almost too tired to drive. He pulled up on the kerb outside the library.
‘Keep the engine running,’ Emily said.
Nick sat behind the wheel and waited while Emily ran up the steps into the building. He rubbed his hands together and wished he had some gloves. The old car’s feeble heating was no match for the bitter pre-dawn cold outside.
His eyes drifted down. A blurred white shape stood out against the darkness, a sheet of paper lying on the passenger seat. The printout. Emily must have left it there in her haste. He flicked on the map light and studied it. In the rush to be away from the computer lab he hadn’t even looked at it; when he asked Emily what she’d found, she’d only put a finger to her lips.
The image in his hand looked like a half-finished jigsaw, one that had been put together impatiently by someone who didn’t have the attention span for the fiddly background bits. Nick had told the program to ignore any fragments which had no marks on them, so as to speed up the assembly process. The result was an hourglass portion of the torn-up page. Whatever Emily had seen certainly wasn’t obvious to Nick. Half the page was taken up with a picture that looked like an ox with an unusually long tail. The digital reconstruction wasn’t perfect: false overlaps and subtle distortions gave the picture an impressionistic blur that wasn’t helped by the dim light in the car. Even so, Nick was pretty confident he could identify the artist by his style. He’d seen enough of the Master of the Playing Cards’ work in the last few days to become an expert.
Underneath the picture were a few lines of writing. This was sharper – Nick’s algorithms were tuned to pick out text – but he still struggled to decipher it. The letters were thick, densely packed into their lines and irregularly shaped: the upright strokes had a vertical solidity like the pillars of a cathedral, while the vaulting curves and cross-strokes bridged them with thread-like delicacy.
He delved in his bag for the bestiary they’d rescued from the warehouse in Brussels and opened its first page to compare. They were different. The book’s pictures were pushed to the side of the text, while on the printout it sat proudly centred in its own space. The handwriting looked neater on the printout too, though when Nick actually tried to read it he found it harder to make out the letters.’
A vivid white flash split the night open. Nick turned in absolute terror. Had he been seen? Photographed? Shot at?
It flashed again – not a camera or a gun, but a strobe light mounted on the front of the library. Nick realised that the sound he’d thought was the panic of his own subconscious was actually the muffled ringing of an alarm bell.
The alarm got suddenly more frantic as the library door burst open. Emily ran out down the steps. She threw herself into the car and slammed the door.
Nick looked at the book in her hands, a tall slim volume bound in red and black cloth.
‘Did you just steal a library book?’
‘Borrowed.’ She shoved it into the pocket in the door. ‘Just drive.’
The car lurched off the kerb and down the road. Nick checked his mirrors but didn’t see anyone coming after them.
‘Now will you tell me what this is all about?’
LX
Mainz, 1448
Two old men stood on a hillside. A passing observer might have taken them for brothers. They were a similar age, near fifty, both with grey beards and lean bodies wrapped in furs against the autumn chill. Their features differed in detail, but beneath the aged skin and crooked bones both faces bore the hunger of men who still had business with the world.
They were not brothers. One was Johann Fust. The other was me. All around us, labourers turned the soil in the sloping field. They pulled up rocks and deposited them in piles to be fitted into walls. In the middle of the field, a group of carpenters raised timbers for a watchtower. When spring came, the derelict land would be planted with vines and blossom into a vineyard. In the same way, I hoped Fust’s seeds would make my own venture flourish.
I had not spoken to him in fifteen years, not since our chance encounter in Olivier’s workshop in Paris. In some ways it was surprising we had not spoken sooner. I had been there a year, and Mainz was not so big that two men engaged in the work of books and papers should not cross paths. But I had avoided him. Until now.
I cannot count the disappointments of those intervening years. Kaspar once told me that the mystery of pressing copies of the playing cards was not one great secret but a dozen – the ink, the metal, the press, the paper – each element in its correct form and proportion. In that I suppose it resembled alchemy, though he produced more than my efforts in Paris ever had. But if his art was a dozen secrets, each to be unravelled and understood, mine comprehended a hundred, or a thousand. Every one of them eluded me. And, as Dunne once told me, every time I solved one problem I created ten new ones.
Yet unlike earlier setbacks, they did not make me despair. I was an overenthusiastic pilgrim who had embarked without knowing his route. Thinking the journey would be short, I had blundered blind in the thickets of the forest. Now I had found my road, though my destination proved to be further than I could have imagined when I set out. And that gave me confidence which stones and blisters could not break.
But though faith sustains a pilgrim, he makes his way in the world of men. I still needed money. And that was why I had come home to Mainz. I had left the city of roads and returned to the city of my birth, like an old bear returning to its cave. When I set out, almost thirty years previous, I had left behind a home, a mother, two siblings and a half-sister who had stolen my inheritance. Now all were gone except the old house, which had finally passed to me.
Fust’s vineyard stood on the hill that rose out of the river valley behind the city. Below, I could see all the walls and spires of Mainz, dominated by the great red dome of the cathedral, stretching forward to the banks of the Rhine. A brown haze smudged the air above it, smoke of countless fires. The autumn sun had reached its zenith, but no bells tolled noon. Every church stood silent. The effect was eerie, as indeed it was meant to be.
‘You chose a strange time to return after so long,’ Fust said. ‘Golden Mainz has lost its lustre.’
I knew. For decades, the patricians who ran the city council – men like my father – had operated an elaborate system of annuities which diverted the tax revenues into their own pockets. The interest they paid themselves had spiralled, much like my own debts, until at last the city was forced to declare bankruptcy. Among its angry creditors was the Church, which promptly suspended all services in the city. Masses went unsung, babies were not baptised and the dead suffered without Christian burial.
‘There must be some wealth still in Mainz.’ Beyond the distant walls, craft of all sizes clustered at the riverbank, while cranes and stevedores loaded bales onto barges. Three milling boats swung at
their moorings, grinding the last of the harvest.
‘This vineyard, for example. It will take years of careful nurturing to bear fruit. You would not be reclaiming it if you thought the city’s prospects were tarnished for ever.’
‘There will always be a demand for wine. The worse things get, the greater it will be.’
Fust looked at the rough earth around him a moment longer, then switched to me. Why have you come here? his sharp eyes said. But he would make me go first.
‘Wine is not all that can flow out of a press,’ I said.
He waited. From the bag I was carrying, I handed him a sheet of paper.
‘I have discovered an art. A new form of writing without a pen.’
He unfolded the paper and studied it. ‘Indulgences?’
‘That is just the beginning.’ I reached in my bag again and pulled out a small booklet, four leaves folded inside each other to give sixteen pages.
‘The Latin primer of Aelius Donatus. Every student in every school needs one.’
He gave me an impatient look: he knew what it was. ‘I must have sold three hundred of these. They sell as fast as the scribes can copy them.’
‘I can copy them faster and more cheaply than any scribe. In a month, I could produce all the copies you have ever sold – and more.’
Fust watched the work of the vineyard around him and said nothing. He had bargained his way from Paris to Vienna and back; he knew how to control his emotions. But he could not hide all his surprise.
He glanced down and read through the first few lines of the book.
‘No corrections,’ he commented. It was true. Unlike other manuscripts there were no crossings-out, no scrawls in the margin.
