I stood beside the press and addressed the assembled team. I do not remember what I said, and I doubt they paid much attention. The only words that mattered that day lay set in lead on the press bed. I concluded with a prayer that God would cast his blessing on our humble enterprise, which we offered in His name and to His purpose.

As soon as I was done, Kaspar stepped forward. He did not look at his audience. He had always been capable of great concentration, in starts, but since his injury he had acquired an almost ferocious power to ignore all around him. I suppose he needed armour against the stares and mockery his deformity drew in the streets.

He uncorked two ink bottles, a large one of black and a small of red. First, he dipped a brush in the red and carefully painted it onto the head line, the rubrication. Then he poured the black into a pool on the block beside the press. It came out thick and sticky as naphtha.

He swirled the ink around the slab with a knife until it was evenly spread, then picked up two leather balls on sticks. He dipped one in the ink and rubbed the two together. When the brown leather was a uniform black, he rubbed them on the metal type in the press, using short round motions like kneading dough. A thin film of ink spread across the form.

He stepped back. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had wanted Kaspar to be a part of this moment – because his painter’s hands were more deft than anyone’s with the ink balls, but also because it was right. He was my lodestar, the beginning of all that followed. Yet – as ever – I felt a drift of unease. There was something about an audience that made him unpredictable, that stoked dangerous fires inside him.

Two young men flanked the press, an apprentice called Keffer I had brought from Strassburg, and Peter Schoeffer. Kaspar had complained about Schoeffer being accorded this honour, but I had overruled him. It was politic, with Fust watching – and deserved. Schoeffer had already proved himself the most promising of my apprentices. He had an instinct for books that none other of our crew of goldsmiths, carpenters, priests and painters could feel.

Schoeffer laid a sheet of vellum onto a board hinged to the bed of the press. Six pins held it in place. He folded it back so that the vellum was held suspended over the inked type, then slid the tray back. It slotted home underneath the platen. He and Ruppel took the handle that drove the screw and pushed it around.

I would have liked to pull it myself, but I was an old man and it wanted strength. The screw creaked and popped as it tightened; the platen pushed down. They held it there a moment, then turned the screw back.

Keffer slid out the tray and folded out the flap, revealing the underside of the vellum. He loosed the pins and pulled it free, made to hold it up then handed it to me instead. The knot of men around me tightened as all vied for a view.

Thousands of tiny letters glistened on the page, wet and black as tar.

n the beginning God created heaven and earth. But the earth was void and empty: shadow covered the earth, and the spirit of God swept over the waters.

It was not complete. The initial ‘I’ would be added later with Kaspar’s copper plate. Tomorrow the leaf would be printed on the reverse. Later it would be brought back for the conjugate pages, two more days, then folded, stitched, eventually bound with all the others. But in itself, it was flawless. Every letter of Götz’s new type had imprinted sharp and whole, more even than any mortal scribe could have made.

I looked to Kaspar, wanting to share the triumph with him. He would not catch my eye. He was staring at the vellum, his face screwed up as if he had bitten a sour apple. I knew what he was looking at: the punctuation in the margin. Peter Schoeffer had been right. The image of perfection was greater if the reality was less so. I could not understand why that should be, but it was.

I was about to go over and embrace Kaspar, to remind him that this was his victory as much as mine, when Fust appeared in front of me. His cheeks were flushed; he was holding a glass of wine. He clapped me on the shoulder.

‘You have done it, Johann. We will run every scribe and rubricator in Mainz out of business.’

I forced myself to smile at him. ‘God willing, this is just the first page of the first copy. We still have almost two hundred thousand to go.’

The true test came ten minutes later, when Schoeffer and Keffer put the second sheet of vellum through the press. Schoeffer pulled it out and hung it on a rack beside the first. I stared between one and the other, scanning every letter for the least deviation.

They were indistinguishable. Perfect copies.

Sunlight shone through a bubble in the windowpane, splaying a fan of colour across the opposite wall. A new covenant. I remembered an old man in Paris.

In the moment of perfection it casts a light like a rainbow. That is the sign.

I drank in my moment of perfection and wished it would never end.

LXXI

Mainz

He was too famous to be doing this. Not that he’d sought it. He despised his colleagues who preened themselves on television, publicising arguments that should have stayed behind the doors of Mother Church. Those men often returned from the studios to find Nevado waiting for them, informing them they had found new vocations in remote dioceses in far-off continents. He enjoyed breaking them, like a gardener pruning branches that disfigured the shape of a tree.

But now he was near the summit of his profession. At such heights, the glare made it impossible to lurk in shadows completely. He became visible. When the last pope died news papers had printed photographs of Nevado, among others. Ignorant commentators wrote ignorant articles for their ignorant readers, breathlessly speculating whether or not he might be papabile. He had read the articles, then used them to light the fire in his Vatican apartments. He’d been burning that sort of waste all his life. It was no more than it deserved.

But error, once it escaped into the world, could not be uprooted entirely. Perhaps fifty years earlier, when he began: not now. Even so, he knew he had to do this. Some men would have called it fate, or destiny; to Cardinal Nevado it was simply God’s purpose.

He pulled the scarf up so that it covered his mouth, and stepped into the church.

They turned down the hill, towards the old town and the river. The houses in Mainz seemed to have been built to a different scale: their high walls dwarfed Nick and Emily as they walked hand in hand down the snowbound street.

The archives were housed in a modern building overlooking a main road, with a park and the Rhine beyond. A passenger ferry sat docked at a wharf opposite.

They were just in time. The archives were about to close for the day, the archivist evidently hoping to get home early in the snow. But she let them in with a scowl, and led them down to the basement, a maze of sagging shelves lit by naked bulbs. In a far corner, she extracted a flat cardboard box from under a pile of files. She put it down on a table shoved against the wall under a heating duct.

‘The reading room is closed already. You can work here.’ She looked at her watch. ‘We give you one hour. Then we lock you in.’

Olaf sat in the church contemplating the angels. Sometimes, when his old eyes blurred out of focus, he enjoyed the illusion that the angels had escaped their glass prison and soared free through the blue heaven above. He imagined Trudi, his first wife, playing among them, and hoped she was happier now than he had ever made her.

The wheelchair jolted forward. Someone had knocked into it from behind. Olaf lifted his wrinkled hand to anticipate the apology – he was used to such things – but none came.