Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie Page B

had been agreed on at the conclave of the cardinals four years before in Basel. The world was wormwood, pocked with greed, and none plundered more than those who had been called to serve the church. The pope himself, in ordering his Jubilee, decreed that the abuses had to stop, and lent his weight to many projects of reform among the Benedictines and the Augustinians as well as within his own house, the hierarchy of the Holy See.
    It was a pious hope indeed. Peter knew it from the instant that he saw the archbishop’s knowing smile, his bland assurance that he endorsed reform. The only reform Dietrich wanted was the restoration of the abbeys’ wealth, for every monastery in the archdiocese was in his jurisdiction. For decades noble families had run them as their private fiefs and stripped them nearly clean, but this would henceforth cease—to honor God, return the monks to upright lives, the monasteries to their former economic strength, and thus increase the archbishop’s own receipts.
    This missal for St. Jakob’s was a marvelous commission, Gutenberg assured his partner, then his crew—the centerpiece of a great push among the Benedictines of the Bursfeld congregation for reform. He had no doubts, and through a night of talking convinced Fust as well that this was just the book they had been waiting to produce. Fust did not like the prospect of the clergy in command of that whole printing works he underwrote, despite his own faith and his uncles’ high positions in the city’s churches. But Gutenberg was a master of manipulation, Peter thought, observing as the two of them discussed it out of earshot of the crew. The master was quite able to convince them all to lift and drink directly from that poisoned chalice.
    For poisoned it most surely was. The handbook of the Mass was hellishly complex, even for the most accomplished scribe. It ran two hundred pages and was written in two, if not three, contrasting scripts: one for the priest’s words; a larger letter for the Gospel readings; and in finer books a third hand for the lyrics of the Psalms.
    The partners called the crew together two days after their return from Eltville. Gutenberg was quite unrecognizable: his hair was trimmed, as was his beard; he seemed to overflow with cheer. Beside him Fust stood, chest thrust out, his cheeks and chin smooth-shaved, convinced no doubt by the sheer money to be made. Who did he take himself for? Peter asked himself. It was a strange inversion, to be sure: patrician Elder wearing whiskers, common merchant fresh of face.
    The master’s hands held something at his back. “I hear there was a bet.” He pulled a volume out and grinned. “It’s neither long nor short, but just the thing.”
    They craned to see the first page of the liber ordinarius , the handbook of the Holy Roman rite. “The first of many, let us pray.” Fust smiled and glanced at Peter.
    “They’ll go like fishcakes at the fair.” Gutenberg looked around at the four men. Hans plucked his throat; Konrad stretched a hand out, gauging the proportions of the page. Keffer pursed his lips and looked at Peter. A little flame inside the new apprentice flickered and went out.
    “Two hundred pages, worth their weight in gold,” said Gutenberg.
    Every priest in every parish, every abbot in his chapel, every soul of wealth and standing, had to have the handbook to the Mass. This edition would be newly drafted by the prior of St. Jakob’s, to be used by all the monasteries of the Bursfeld congregation, he explained. But nothing said their workshop had to limit it to that.
    With curving yellowed nails he started ticking off prospective buyers: seventy for Bursfeld in the dioceses of Mainz and Bamberg; forty, fifty more for churches in the cities, who’d strong-arm the wealthy of their parish to endow their pulpits with a copy. Nor was the Latin rite restricted to the Rhineland, nor to Germany and Austria and Bohemia, comprising their own Holy Roman Empire. Peter