by Tom Harper
‘I suppose we should finish our business.’ He gave me the document to sign and seal. ‘I am sorry this is necessary. The psalter is late; the Church is slow to pay, so I must borrow more money. The Jew had heard about our disagreement and demanded an assurance that you accepted all the terms of the court’s judgment. It is only a formality.’ He lit a candle and reached for the sealing wax.
‘You will forgive me if I am cautious about anything you give me to sign.’
‘Of course.’ A sharp-toothed smile. I could not wound him so easily.
I read it through. Fust took the contents of the Humbrechthof, the presses and types, the ink and paper, the furniture, down to the last composing stick. He also kept the finished Bibles to sell at his own profit. The Gutenberghof, its press and everything in it remained mine. There was a time when I had burned with the injustice of it; now my anger had cooled. It was past.
I signed my name at the bottom and pressed my seal into the soft wax. Punch and form. Fust did the same.
‘You have a new seal,’ I noticed. A black bird with a yoke around its neck, supporting two black shields blazoned with letters and stars.
‘The Fust and Schoeffer Book Works. Peter designed it. We will stamp it in all our works, a hallmark of our quality. Customers will demand nothing less.’
I did not like it. In its way, it seemed a greater blasphemy than anything Kaspar ever did. To put your mark on a piece of art, to claim it for your own, was to appropriate it from God.
Again, Fust misinterpreted my frown. ‘I am sorry,’ he repeated. He wanted me to believe it. ‘The street between our houses is not so very long. No doubt we will see each other. I hope we can be friends.’
I was old enough that it barely hurt to lie. ‘I hope so. But not now. I am leaving Mainz for a time.’
There was no missing his relief. ‘Where will you go?’
‘I have an errand in Strassburg.’
*
April sunshine bathed the city. The half-timbered houses and Gothic turrets shone with a warm light; bright colours festooned the square where racks of tea towels, postcards and guidebooks had sprung up like spring flowers. Crowds of tourists milled about, enjoying the Easter holiday, while kings and angels, lions, knights and serpents watched from the stone above.
No one paid any attention to the young couple who walked hand in hand across the square. They entered the cathedral by the west door, under the monumental facade, into the deep twilight that kept perpetual hold on the interior. To their left, on the north wall, a row of stained-glass kings glowed vivid with the light behind them. Nick’s pulse quickened; he squeezed Emily’s hand.
Atheldene was waiting for them about halfway along the nave, just before a side chapel interrupted the procession of kings. A fluorescent vest was draped awkwardly over his suit, and a hard hat perched on his head. At the base of the pillar behind him, a stone mason in overalls stood in a hydraulic scissor lift.
‘I hope you’re right about this. You can’t imagine the paperwork involved in pulling apart one of the masterpieces of Gothic architecture. Especially when the people who want to do it are all personae non gratae with the Church hierarchy. I’ve had to call in a career’s worth of favours and tell the most outrageous fibs.’
Nick took the bestiary out of his bag. The corner of the battered card poked from behind the last page. He tucked it back in. Soon he’d have to surrender both – the card to rejoin the deck at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the book to the British Library in London. It had all been discreetly arranged courtesy of Stevens Mathison. Nick, who had never owned any book older than a Superman #61 Issue, would be sad to let them go.
But the bestiary had one last secret to give up. He opened it to the restored front page, cut out by Gillian but now expertly sewn back in. In the bottom corner was the sketch of the square building standing in the arms of a cross which they’d noticed on the boat to Oberwinter.
It was Emily who had finally deciphered it.
‘It’s not a building with a cross,’ she’d said, one evening back in New York. ‘It’s a building at a crossroads.’
Nick hadn’t been impressed. ‘That narrows it down.’
‘It does if you know anything about Gutenberg’s life.’ An exas perated sigh. ‘Strasbourg – the city of roads. The crossroads of Europe.’
‘And that building…’
‘The cathedral.’
It was a doodle – it could have been any building with an arched door. It didn’t even have much of a tower.
‘It all fits. The crossroads. The kings on the walls and the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. Gutenberg.’
And so they had come back, to the church at the crossroads where two dozen kings of uncertain realms stood entombed in glass.
‘Manasses was the sixteenth King of Israel.’ Emily counted off the kings in the windows, four at a time, until she came to the window opposite where they were standing. ‘Louis the Pious.’
‘Seems appropriate.’
‘Gillian’s going to be kicking herself if we’re right,’ said Atheldene.
Nick went quiet. He’d crossed Europe to find Gillian and, unbelievably, he’d rescued her. He still wasn’t sure what he’d found. He no longer lay awake at night wondering what might have been. He no longer wanted her to hold him and whisper she was sorry for everything, begging him for a second chance. But some questions couldn’t be answered. She would always be the wild woman, untamed and unknowable, dancing in the margins.
Nick and Emily put on yellow vests and hard hats. The lift carried them up the side of the column, high over the heads of the tourists below. One or two looked up, but the sight of reflective clothing seemed to reassure them that nothing interesting was happening. High-visibility camouflage.
‘How could Gutenberg ever have gotten up here?’ Nick wondered.
‘They were still building and rebuilding the cathedral when he was here. There was probably some scaffolding around the pillars.’
The lift eased to a stop. They were almost at head height with the kings now, face to face with the carvings on the pillar. A man’s head pushing through thick foliage. An eagle with a snake in its beak. And…
‘The digging bear.’ Nick had known it would be there: Atheldene had spotted it from the ground and sent a photograph. Even so, he felt a shiver of unexpected awe. This close, he could see how similar it was to the animal on the card. A little squashed, maybe, to fit the space on the pillar: a flatter back, a sharper bend in its knee that made it more purposeful. In the bottom corner, a small hole had been bored in the stone beside its burrowing snout.
Bear is the key.
The mason took out a thin metal hook like a dentist’s pick. ‘If I find any cement, we stop,’ he warned.
But there was no mortar holding it in place – only generations of accumulated grime and soot packed into a treacly black muck. The mason worked it free with his tool. It left a thin crack outlining the stone.
‘Squeaky-bum time,’ said Atheldene. He took the bear by its snout and inched it towards him. It came smoothly, almost eagerly. He and the mason lifted it down onto the floor of the lift. A rectangular hole yawned in the pillar.
‘There’s something in there.’
Emily reached in. Her hands came out holding a rusted metal box, about the size of a biscuit tin. Big enough to hold a book. Hands trembling, Atheldene inserted a blade into the lid and prised it open. All three of them craned to look in.
‘It’s… disintegrated.’
The box contained nothing but a deep layer of scraps, like soap flakes or autumn leaves gathered up for the bonfire. Most bore traces of writing; some flashed gold or red where fragments of illuminations caught light from the stained-glass windows. None was more than an inch across.
‘Water vapour must have got in. If the parchment had been exposed to sunlight at any point previously, moisture would have broken it apart.’
Emily pulled on a latex glove and picked up one of the fragmen
ts. Even now, the ink was black and glossy.
‘This is the right typeface for the Liber Bonasi.’
‘Some of it’s different.’ Atheldene pointed to another fragment where the words were in brown ink. Even Nick could see it was handwritten, not printed.
‘… many names… goose meat…’ Atheldene let it fall back in the box. ‘I don’t know what this is.’
Emily sifted quickly through a few more of the pieces. ‘It looks as if there were two books in here. The Liber Bonasi and a much longer manuscript. They’re all mixed up.’
Nick stared into the box. He couldn’t begin to count how many fragments there must be. Thousands? Millions? Some had probably disintegrated completely; others might be illegible. But he had time.
He smiled at Emily. ‘We can piece it together.’
I stepped into the Gutenberghof for the last time, glancing as always at the pilgrim on the lintel. I resembled him more after my ordeal with the inquisitor. My back stooped, my neck drooped. On cold days even breathing was painful. But the load I had carried hidden under my cloak so long was almost done.
The others were waiting for me upstairs. Saspach and Götz, Günther, Keffer and Ruppel – and half a dozen others, men whose names have not figured in my chronicle, though I saw them almost daily as we worked the press. Mentelin the scribe, who had begun work on a new set of types since Fust took mine; Numeister, Sweynheym, Sensenschmidt and Ulrich Han. Only Kaspar was absent. In the middle, towering above them all, stood the press. Like all of us, it had aged: stained with ink, dented from all the times we had needed to hammer out jams, its screw no longer quite straight – but still capable of sixteen pages an hour in the hands of good men.
‘I am going away,’ I said without preamble. There were murmurs of disappointment, but no great shock. Since the trial, and all that followed it, they had watched me slowly unravelling myself from the business of the house. After the great work of the Bible, I had no enthusiasm for calendars and grammar books.
‘Keffer will run the workshop in my absence. For the time being, he will focus on texts we already have set – indulgences and so forth – while we build up capital and train new apprentices.’
‘For the rest of you, you are welcome to stay in my house as long as you wish. But do not waste your time. Teach yourselves the arts you do not know. If you are a compositor, learn type-founding; if you have only ever boiled ink, learn how to spread it so that it makes an even impression every time. Share your knowledge freely. Then go back to your home towns, or cities you have always dreamed of, and establish workshops of your own. Train apprentices, and let them train apprentices of their own. Join no guild, but challenge each man to make his master-piece. Spread this art the length and breadth of Christendom so that all men may read, learn, understand and grow. You will make mistakes; only God is perfect. Some men, perhaps even some of you, will use this art we have devised for wrong ends. That is inevitable. This tool is too powerful to be kept in the hands of any one or two men. As long as we imprint more good on the world than would otherwise have been, this art will be a blessing.’
I left them there and went out into the warm April sunshine. I had given up my dream: I would not make any perfect thing. I was merely a man. At a younger age it would have devastated me; now I felt only the relief of a great burden lifted. I was at peace with an imperfect world.
I had not gone five miles from Mainz when I thought of a way I could make the press better.
HISTORICAL NOTE
For a man whose invention transformed the world, Johann Gutenberg left remarkably little of his own life imprinted on history: a few receipts, a couple of mentions in civic documents, and partial records of the four court cases referenced in this novel. Most of them raise more questions than they answer. The reality they reveal – industrial espionage, non-disclosure agreements, intellectual property rights, demand ing venture-capitalist investors, precarious financing, lawsuits – would be familiar to any Silicon Valley entrepreneur today. They remind us that printing was a uniquely complex and expensive undertaking, requiring vast sums of capital to be invested over many years, as well as management skills and a production-line organisation almost unknown in the Middle Ages. Gutenberg’s genius must have been for financial engineering and logistics, just as much as his technical mastery of inks, metals, mechanisms and paper. In this book, I have allowed my imagination free reign over Gutenberg’s early years. The later chapters, in Strassburg and Mainz, are more anchored to the few facts that are generally agreed.
But Gutenberg’s life is an open book compared to that of the Master of the Playing Cards. Nothing survives except for his work, a vague idea of the time and place where he lived, and the consensus that he was the first man to print images from copper engravings. Like other artistic breakthroughs, not least Gutenberg’s Bible, the cards are not just technologically innovative but genuine masterpieces.
The idea that these two giants of early printing could have met and collaborated is compelling, though unprovable. Both were active in the first half of the fifteenth century in the Rhineland; both used presses in some of the earliest examples of mechanised mass-production. As described in the novel, several of the Master’s images appear in an illuminated Gutenberg Bible now at Princeton University, while others appear in a giant handwritten Bible which must have been produced in Mainz at the same time as Gutenberg’s Bible was coming off the press.
If the ideal of the medieval artist was to leave no trace of himself on work that ultimately derived from God, then both Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards succeeded almost too well. The Master’s name is lost to history; Gutenberg was equally forgotten for almost two hundred years, buried by Fust and Schoeffer’s propaganda. But for their passion to mass-produce text and images, the modern world is their monument.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank everybody who helped and encouraged me in writing this book. Dr Natalia Nowakowska of Somerville College, Oxford for sharing her research on early printing; Maxime Préaud at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, who generously allowed me to examine the original playing cards; Dr Allen and the Mystery Writers’ Forum; Oliver Johnson, collaborator and editor; the Banse family and Isabella Paul for their hospitality in Germany and much else; my family, especially my father for his German expertise; Jon, Sarah and Agnes Hawkins, for whom The Rhineland Testament remains one of the great fictive might-have-beens; my agent Jane Conway-Gordon, despite her threats to withhold chocolate cake; the Inter-Continental Literary Agency; John Kelly; Charlotte Haycock and everyone at Random House; the staffs at the British Library in London and Boston Spa, the York Minster Library, and the JB Morrell library at the University of York.
After eight books, it would be easy to take my wife Emma’s patience and support for granted: instead, it only seems more extraordinary. She made what could have been a particularly challenging writing period one of the calmest I can remember.
My son Owen arrived a month after I began this book. He came along on my research trip, charmed his way across Europe, and was exposed to more Gothic architecture than is safe for any five-month-old. He also contributed random punctuation in the moments when he got through my defences to the keyboard. Born into a world where the communications revolution begun by Gutenberg is reaching unfathomable new dimensions, this book is for him.
Tom Harper
Tom Harper was born in Germany and studied medieval history at Oxford university. He has written eight novels, including Knights of the Cross and Lost Temple. He lives in York with his wife and son.
***
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-c89cb3-0002-0b42-74a4-1941-38be-be843f
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 08.09.2010
Created using: Fiction Book Designer software
Document authors :
Source URLs :
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1
.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
