Endymion Spring (11 page)

Since the start of the year, Herr Gutenberg had been pushing us to complete a trial section of the Bible for the upcoming fair in Frankfurt, now only a few days away.
 
He had swiftly invested
Fust's
money in five additional presses and even more compositors who, together with the other apprentices, had relocated to the
Humbrechthof
, a more spacious abode where the majority of printing was taking place.
 
Peter and I, however, remained his special charges, sharing a bed at the top of his house.
 
Peter was fast becoming a talented printer, while my fingers were still the undisputed masters of the type.

Work was progressing on the new Bible, a mammoth undertaking for which we had prepared thousands of pieces of type and countless reams of paper.
 
Even at this rate it would take us another two years to complete the massive tome.
 
My Master had planned on printing one hundred fifty copies initially, including thirty on the finest parchment, but already there was a growing list of subscribers:
 
clergymen and patricians all hungry to see how our fabulous machine compared with the work of the most industrious scribes.
 
There was even talk of our being in league with the Devil, for how else could we achieve identical copies of the same text so quickly?
 
Of course, it
wall
all nonsense.
 
It was simply down to our hard work.

Herr Gutenberg was busier than ever before.
 
Each day, he refined the typeface a little bit more and resized the margins, experimenting with the number of lines he could fit onto each page.
 
Everything had to be just so.
 
He expected his Bible to be the most beautiful, legible book ever created:
 
a tribute to his ingenuity, a testament to God's Holy Word and a profitable enterprise that would repay
Fust's
investment many times over.

Fust
, for his part, was more often to be seen in Gutenberg's house, close to his mysterious chest, than in the workrooms.
 
To him, the Bible was of only minor importance.
 
Another project was occupying his thoughts.
 
I wouldn't have been surprised to learn he was practicing the Black Art, secretly hoping to uncover the laws of the universe, for I frequently saw him poring over old manuscripts belonging to the Barefoot Friars, trying to piece together fragments of ancient texts:
 
strange lines, runes and symbols that befuddled most minds.
 
His fingers were black from the pages he perused and a heavy shadow haunted his eyes.
 
Often, while I bent over my table, arranging words, he watched me — holding out a hand to stop me, as if testing the quality of my work.
 
I shrank from his touch.

He timed his visits, I noticed, according to the waxing and waning of the moon, staying longest on those nights of total darkness, when even the faintest glimmer of light failed to illumine the sky.
 
Tonight, only a splinter of moon was visible through the window at the top of our bedchamber, snagging a few clouds on its pilgrimage over the city.
 
Yet it was enough to show me that the room was empty.
 
Peter was gone.

A

At first I presumed he was on another of his nocturnal missions to see Christina,
Fust's
dark-haired daughter.
 
He had developed quite an infatuation for the modest, kindhearted maiden.
 
On religious days, when work was suspended on the press, he could be seen lingering outside the walls of
Fust's
house like an exiled lover — and by night, in our bed, he could be heard chattering about her beauty.
 
But Peter was not with Christina tonight.

From somewhere deep in the house came voices.
 
Whispers.
 
Traces of movement scudded across the print room below, as though someone were dragging
Fust's
chest out of hiding and sliding it along the floor.

Wiping the drowsiness from my eyes, I crept towards the stairs.
 
The candle in its iron holder had burned down to a tallow stub that gave off a fatty, rancid smell, but no light.
 
I stumbled, trying to find my way in the dark.
 
Shadows moved around me like quicksilver.

I descended slowly, careful not to make a sound.
 
Even the slightest creak of wood might betray my eavesdropping ears.

The room below was aglow with red light.
 
From the stairway, I could see that the fire was a riot of flame, a phoenix reborn from the ashes.
 
Shapes dashed and flickered along the walls, dancing round the press like devilish minions.

I stepped nearer.

Fust
was bent over the horrendous chest, which he had dragged towards the flames.
 
Muttering an incantation I could not understand, he ran his fingers along the sides of the box.
 
Then, in a deft movement, like a scribe replenishing his quill, he dipped them in a cup that Peter held out before him.

I nearly collapsed.
 
The ink was dark and thick, like blood.

Quickly,
Fust
coiled his hands round the serpents' heads and fed them each a bubble of liquid from his fingertips.
 
The fangs seemed to bite into his skin and then slide together at his bidding.
 
The lid yawned open.

Had my eyes deceived me?
 
Were the fangs not poisonous, as I had always believed?

I inched closer.

The press stood like a monster chained to the floor in the middle of the room and I ducked beneath its wooden belly, wedging myself between its protective legs.

From the top of the chest
Fust
now pulled out a pale silver-green animal skin.
 
I caught my breath.
 
He held it up to the light, where it immediately absorbed the glow of the fire and turned red like a sunset — a blood-soaked battlefield.

Amazed, Peter held out a hand to stroke it.

Fust
batted him aside.
 
"
Psst
!
 
Do not touch," he hissed as he draped the layers of skin on the floor and plunged his hands deep into the dark interior of the chest.

My eyes widened further as he withdrew a long billowing sheet of paper, which seemed to ripple and stir with life.
 
I had never seen such a spectacle before.
 
It was an enormous wing of parchment!
 
The paper was as white as snow, but did not melt, not even in the blaze of the fire, which crackled and spat nearby.
 
Instead, the enchanted skin seemed to suck the color from the flames and burn with a more intense whiteness.
 
Even my Master's best parchment looked dull in comparison.

My fingers squeezed the legs of the press.
 
I longed to feel this amazing apparition for myself.

The chest contained other, similar sheets of paper — I could see them lapping in the box like a moonlit sea — but even as I watched, this single leaf divided in
Fust's
hands into ever-finer,
thiner
membranes that were all nearly transparent, yet veined with a delicate silver light.
 
There seemed to be no end to the number of pages emerging from this individual sheet alone.
 
It was a miracle!

"Yet for all its fragility, it is virtually indestructible," said
Fust
, dipping a corner of the skin into the fire.

I listened, astounded, as the paper emitted a soft hiss, but did not burst into flame as I had expected it would.
 
Instead, it seemed to douse the fire, which turned from raging red to sullen gray and back again.
 
Yet there wasn't so much as a scorch or a burn mark on the paper when
Fust
retrieved it from the fire.

I rubbed my eyes.
 
Could this be real?

Peter peered over his Master's shoulder.
 
"How did you come upon this — this magic parchment?" he asked with an incredulous whisper.

Fust
remained silent and thoughtful for a while.
 
Then he smiled.
 
The tip of his tongue protruded briefly between his teeth
,
 
"
You could say it was a gift from an especially pious fool in
Haarlem
."

Breathlessly, I listened as he explained the origins of the paper.

Several years before, a Dutchman named Laurens
Coster
had been out walking near his home in the Low Countries with his granddaughter, a girl of no more than five or six.
 
Coming to the middle of a wood, they had chanced upon a magnificent tree he had never seen before.
 
To his surprise, she had insisted she could see a dragon hiding in its leaves.

"And was there?" asked Peter, with bated breath.

"Patience!" said
Fust
, silencing him with a reproachful stare.
 
"I shall tell you."

Coster's
granddaughter was an imaginative girl, prone to dreams and fancies, and
Coster
did not believe her.
 
The tree looked like a mighty beech to him.
 
And so, to prove her wrong, he had stuck his knife deep into the heart of the trunk — in a whorl of bark that looked diseased — and challenged the dragon to reveal itself or be chopped into firewood.
 
Nothing happened.
 
The dragon failed to appear.

"In a rage, the girl stomped off," continued
Fust
, seeming to delight in the young girl's distress.
 
His eyes burned with a vicious light.
 
"She was so blinded by tears that she ran headlong into another tree and fell to the ground.
 
Her cry brought her grandfather running."

Peter was losing interest in the story, for he asked what this had to do with the paper.

"I am getting to it," remarked
Fust
coldly.
 
"The little girl scraped an elbow or a knee, I cannot remember which, but the abrasion bled — enough to make her grandfather staunch the wound with a cloth."

He held up a finger to silence Peter, who was about to interrupt.

"This is important," he said severely.
 
"To cheer her up,
Coster
used part of the bark of the tree she had found to whittle a series of letters for her as a toy alphabet.
 
He was a master craftsman, you see, used to designing woodcuts.
 
He wrapped the letters in the blood-soaked cloth and led her home, resolving to return as soon as she was asleep and chop down the tree — for it really would make splendid firewood."

Fust
paused to study Peter's face.
 
"Only, when he arrived back at his lodging," he continued, lowering his voice, "
Coster
found that the letters had transferred more than their sap to his bloody rag."

Peter shook his head.
 
"What do you mean?"

"I mean, Peter," said
Fust
, "imprinted on the cloth were not just the outlines of the letters he had carved, but a whole word — a word strung together by some unseen, all-knowing hand.
 
It really was as if the tree had possessed a dragon... or a spirit."

Peter's mouth dropped open.
 
"But—"

"The letters," said
Fust
, even more slowly, "were addressing
Coster's
granddaughter by name."

Peter tugged on his ear, as if he had misheard.

"But how can that be?"

Fust
appeared to smile.
 
A shiver crept up and down my spine.

"Open your eyes, boy.
 
The answer lies before you."

He spat into the fire.

Shielded from the flames, the dragon skin on the floor had turned back to its original greenish silver color, like a mount do frosty leaves.
 
Once again, I found myself desiring to bury my hands in its tempting texture.

"You mean there was a dragon in that tree all along?" stammered Peter.
 
"It knew her?"

Fust
jerked his wrist slightly and caused the expanding sheet of paper in his had to fold shut again.
 
"When
Coster
returned to the forest," he said "he found a mass of quivering leaves in the clearing, exactly where the large tree had been.
 
The creature was writing in agony, tearing its
barklike
hide across the ground, in the very throes of a burning death.
 
Its last breath left the earth scorched and fallow."

Fust
paused to consider the fire in the hearth for a moment.
 
The flames were fizzing and sighing.

"After the dragon's incineration," he resumed, "
Coster
found a mound of pure white paper and intact scales among the ash and debris — a perfect parchment.
 
The temptation to gather it in his arms was too strong for him to resist."

"And
Coster
showed you this?
 
Peter took up the story excitedly, pointing at the open chest.
 
"He gave you the dragon skin?"

Fust
hesitated.
 
"Let's just say he opened his storeroom to me one Christmas Eve," he said, evading the question.

Peter turned to his Master in horror.
 
"You mean you stole it?
 
On Christmas Eve, too!
 
How could you?"