Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie

fields. At university he took all four lower orders of theology; the Benedictines beseeched him to remain and take his vows.
    But he had known—or merely prayed—that God had traced for him some other path. He knew it still, and more acutely, faced with this new devil. The candle guttered in a draft, and Peter paused. What is your meaning here, O Lord?
    Père Lamasse had counseled him not even one full year ago, when Peter confessed that he desired to leave the library at the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. Much as he loved the worship of the monks, he felt a pull toward the swirling, pulsing world outside. The abbot touched his head and said the Lord had portioned out to each his own appointed task. This was the goal of our life’s journey: to listen and to wait, and when it came, to heed the call.
    Peter sat there, feeling every heartbeat in the scorched flesh of his hand. God knew he was no priest. And if one thing was clear to him, he was no smith—and never would be.

CHAPTER 3
     
    MAINZ
     
             October – November 1450
    H IS FATHER RETURNED just before All Soul’s Day. Grede’s bustling—the hanging of the tapestries, the laying of the fires—let the household know that he was due. Peter’s hand was nearly healed. His stepmother had used the age-old remedies of women from the land: a comfrey poultice mixed with feverfew to leach the heat. The scars were hard to see unless you knew to look.
    Fust had been gone a month by then. Grede said he might still try to squeeze in one more trip before the snows. He’d managed to evade the bishop’s ban; somehow he’d found a way to buy and sell. Peter did not ask how lucky or how foolish that might be. As he went to find Fust at the customs hall, he had more pressing matters on his mind.
    The Kaufhaus had been magic to him once. Many times he had been sent by Fust’s first wife into its lofty, aromatic vault—had woven, senses stunned, among its sacks and bales to fetch the man he’d learned to think of and address as Father. It was a temple too, Fust always said—not to the Lord, but to the trade that made His world go round. Teak and tusks and barrels of Madeira; carded wool and coal; oils and spice and Rhineland wine; nuts and ores and semiprecious stones. How Peter as a boy had breathed in all those swirling scents: of skins and wood sap, tang of sweat and citrus, flavors of the distant lands from whence these goods arrived.
    From the knoll outside the Hof zum Gutenberg he could see the cornice lifting up above the blue slate rooftops, surmounted by a lordly frieze of statues hewn from red Mainz sandstone: the seven prince electors—three archbishops and four worldly lords—of the Reich. Their own archbishop, Dietrich, held the center, gazing down on them with massive, sightless eyes.
    The more substantial merchants kept their offices up on the gallery that ringed the trading floor. The hall was quiet, just a few high wagons left unhitched inside the portal. Peter threaded past the shrouded stalls and climbed the worn stone stairs toward the office marked “Fust Brothers.” A scribe had lettered it in gold some years before, each word inside a shield that hung from a brown fustus , the knotted branch that was the emblem of their house. Peter heard men’s voices, recognized his uncle’s, knocked and pushed the door.
    “Peter!” Fust rose, smiling broadly. “You must have second sight. I only just arrived.” Indeed, he was dressed as plainly as a tinker, leggings and dun jacket splashed with mud, a filthy robe tossed on a chair. He’d have tucked whatever coin or weapon he carried right against his skin. Jakob twisted in his seat and raised a hand, a thinner version of his older brother. “Aha,” he said. “The prodigal returns.”
    Peter forced a smile. “That was the youngest one of three, I thought.” He reached to shake his hand.
    They hadn’t seen each other for an age. Jakob had lost weight: his cheeks were sharp, his