Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie Page A

designated trades, or ranks, or ores. He scowled and rolled the sleeve up his left arm. The scar from shearing he had borne since he was five snaked from his wrist up to his elbow.
    “Peter Schoeffer, born at Gernsheim. Not a Fust. The sheep were kept inside, so you could say, I guess, that I was born in a stable.”
    “Now he plays the Christ child,” Hans said snidely. Konrad laughed, though, and something in the room shifted.
    “You shut your gob,” Konrad said again to Hans, and pulled his knife out of the table. He smiled and surveyed the full length of that white scar. “That’s mighty nice. It might look better, though—more balanced, if you get my meaning—if I could carve you something matching on the right.”
    They got on better after that. Hans never admitted that he’d been out of line, but he thawed bit by bit throughout the Advent-tide. The more the world outside iced over, the more the mood inside the workshop warmed. It helped that Gutenberg had gone away again; it also helped that Hans, for all his bluster, was a man who honored work. He knew that the new apprentice had not once voiced a complaint through all those hellish weeks of smelting.
    A few days after Peter bared his forearm, Hans pulled him aside and said that he was sick of pouring molten metal into that damned casting box. He much preferred to smelt and mix the metal, and to leave the blinding part to someone else. He nudged Peter toward the casting table. “Fancy hands make you the man.”
    It was a change—and in the absence of a sign from Petrus Heilant, Peter craved change of any kind.
    He listened and watched closely as Hans demonstrated how to cast a piece of metal type. First he lifted off the top of the wooden casting box to show a row of trays filled with damp sand. Hans pressed a letter punch into the sand, and then another: first the long ascending stroke, and then a rounded shorter one, to make the hollows for a letter h . He did this in each tiny square and then closed the lid, divided into narrow chimneys just above each tray. He took a ladle, dipped it in the pot of molten metal, and poured some into each shaft. When they were full, he waited, counting up to five, and then opened up the box and pulled the hardened letters out. “Still need some filing,” he said, tossing each one on a pile. He handed Peter the two punches. “An idiot could do it,” he said, grinning.
    Hans had never cared to know his state of mind or heart and did not seem to do so now. He simply watched, his leathered eyelids half obscuring his keen eyes—then reached, correcting: straightening Peter’s elbow, sliding his hand a fraction farther down the punch. His words were few and focused on the task: “Not so deep.” “Put a little power there.” He taught Peter how to hold the punch at one precise, specific angle, how to ease the top on without disturbing one small grain of sand. He skimmed the skin that formed upon the metal, with a flick of his wrist showed how to pour the molten trickle in.
    The chunks of metal with a letter on their tip were no prettier than they had been before, but for the first time Peter understood—in the plain act of molding and of making—that what they did was utterly astonishing. No one before had ever made small letters out of metal: it was the unexpected combination—the marrying of metalwork to writing—that had birthed a thing that no man on God’s green earth had seen before.
    The master’s insight had been simple: take a binder’s tool and make a mold. But he had seen that he could never make a punch for every single different letter of the scribal hand. So he had broken each one down into its elemental strokes: the straight descending line, the round form of the n , the o . Thus armed with a bare score of symbols, they could build each letter of the alphabet by layering each stroke in the damp sand.
    It was a Calvary, as Gutenberg had said. But something in the blinding focus of it worked an