Gutenberg's Apprentice Read Online Free Page B

testily. “I’m in the thick of it, I can’t—” He broke off then and smacked his forehead with his hand. “Forgive me,” he said, giving Fust a rueful smile. “Of course—I quite forgot that you might call. It’s second nature now, to keep stray eyeballs out.”
    Yet they were hardly strays. If Peter understood it right, his father was this madman’s financier.
    “I thought it time that Peter saw your new technique,” his father said.
    Instantly, the man’s sharp face was inches from his own. Up close his eyes weren’t black, as they had first appeared, but brown and flecked with topaz. His hair was wild and bristling to his shoulders, and his beard cascaded from his chin down his whole chest, glinting here and there like twists of wire.
    “You’ll swear to keep it secret first. Upon your life.” The breath that sprayed on Peter’s face was rank.
    “I swear,” he muttered, and at that, this Johann Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg, spun quickly and began to lope down a dim hall. They followed through a door and out into a courtyard where, half blinded, Peter saw the dark shape turn once more and bark, “Your life!” before it yanked the heavy stable door.
    Heat and noise hit them first. A searing darkness, stoked by fire, a throbbing clatter: battering of mallets on metal, the duller thud of wood on wood. As Peter’s eyes adjusted he could see that just three men caused all this din. A red-haired giant stood beside a weird contraption made of wood; in the far corner two other men were silhouettes before the orange glow of a hot forge.
    “Impressoria.” The master of the place stretched out his arm. “Printing. Though the word alone does not begin to do it justice.” Inside his workshop his face had come alive with a fierce pride. “It’s more a system like a watercourse, a clock—a series of precise and interlocking parts.” His right arm scooped the whole thing toward him. “I had to devise each bloody part—each tool, each instrument, each wretched motion of each lousy hand—and make the whole thing mesh.”
    He led them toward the fire, into a smoke so foul and so astringent that he tossed them cloths to cover up their mouths and noses. “Hans and Keffer make the metal.” Four reddened eyes surveyed them above filthy scarves. The master turned to Peter, eyes like those of some demented barber-surgeon. “I hope to hell that you can smelt.”
    God, no . The hissing of the coals and acrid fumes had plunged him instantly back in that filthy corner of his uncle’s shop where he had sweated and endured. Alongside any number of poor grunts, his cousin and a clown named Keffer, too—if this staring swaddled face was he, and not some brother or cousin. The bloodshot eyes gave off no clue.
    “All Fusts were raised up at the forge,” Fust slid in before Peter could respond.
    Gutenberg gave a brusque nod. “We cast the letters in reverse until we’ve got enough to set ’em into lines.” He jerked his wild head toward his financier. “You see now why I started small.”
    From there they lined the letters into pages, covered them with ink, and gave them to the pressman, he went on. The ginger giant promptly straightened when the master strode toward him. “You need a mountain bear like Konrad here to heave the bar.” This bar was a long handle jutting from a wooden platform that looked strangely like the presses they erected in the vineyards for the harvest. Peter walked around it, studying its parts. There was a long and narrow tabletop the size of a small coffin; over this a kind of wooden gallows rose. Through its topmost bar was threaded not a noose but a huge wooden screw, from which was dangling, just above the tabletop, a massive wooden block.
    “My press,” said Gutenberg. He stood there for an instant, fiddling with his beard, watching their eyes. The man called Konrad slathered a black paste onto a block of metal that on closer view was seen to be a half dozen lines of letters,