All through the first years of my life, there was only the dirt. It gave my family the crops we needed to live our short, toilsome lives. It coated my hands like a gritty glove; uncomfortable but familiar, it was the sign that I was fulfilling my purpose. And when I lay down to sleep, it held me up, whispering to me that above or below, it would always care for me, that it was me. I never had a reason to question its words.

Six days a week, the same as my brothers who had survived the pox, we were in the fields, tending to the humble potatoes and praying to the Lord God that the blight would not take our field before it could be harvested. Greater rewards awaited us in Heaven, as the priest had foretold, so we welcomed the moment our Lord would decide it was time for our lives to end, be it through pox, blight, sword or storm. 

Still, though it was a sin, the fear remained. I felt it. My brothers felt it. Maybe when we became men, we told ourselves, the fear would die, leaving only the work and the faith. Until then, we would pray to be strong.

******

Winter was always a season of transformation. With the harvest gathered, we were apprenticed to trades within the town.

We never knew if we'd be good at the trades we undertook, but like the Lord commanded, we did our work as though we were doing it for God. My two oldest brothers wanted to become blacksmiths, but in the same year, they both set fire to the smithy’s workshop after carelessly misplacing hot steel. My second-oldest brother did not survive his accident. Two others were apprenticed to the carpenters and the last to the masons, but they too caused more loss of time and coin than their masters were willing to bear. Only my two sisters, who became weavers, were spared from the curse of the Haas family blunders. 

It did not disturb me to be given to service at the church. Too weak to work with a hammer and just as clumsy and unfortunate as my brothers, perhaps my mother and father believed that God would make my spirit strong where my body was not.

I found the trivium and quadrivium to be difficult to learn. If it were not for Johann, I would have been destined to be a beggar when I became a man. Johann had been adopted by the monastery as a baby. The bastard son of a fallen squire and a young mother who had died in childbirth, Johann had a talent for understanding that defied his age. He had been uninterested in chess or sledding, instead preferring to read the handwritten books kept in the monastery.

In fact, he was the only one in the monastery who could read all of its works. No one knew why, but as the scribes got further into their years and their works, they would grow mad, and their hands would begin to shake. This was the result of witchcraft, the abbot had said. Their works became nearly unreadable, and they themselves would become violent, gnashing their blue-black teeth. In time, Johann - just a boy of 9 years like myself - became the sacrist, if not in name.

In exchange for three pots of water from the river daily, Johann would teach me how to understand the jagged lines that made up what he called “letters.” It was a slow effort: both the water and the tutelage. When I learned the letters, he said, I could learn the “words.” I was not as wise as Johann, but he was patient, and he could teach as well as the friars he worked for. All of the elders agreed that he would be the greatest of the Lord’s servants to ever grace Reinfeld.

******

It was before dawn on a Tuesday morning, when Johann pounded on my door. Wearily, I rose from my bed to open up. I suspected that I was to be punished for my slovenly work with the trivium yesterday; it had been difficult, and I had grown discouraged.

“Otto! You must see what I found!” Johann said. There was a thrill in his voice I had never heard before. He grabbed me by the wrist, and we ran down the wooden steps to the library, paying no heed to the loud creaks that would surely rouse the friars from their slumber.

Illuminated by firelight, a book sat open on a table.

"Look at this!" Johann gestured with his hand to the letters on the page.

"It's…a book," I said groggily. I could feel my face sag with exhaustion.

"Yes, but…look!"

What was on the pages was like no writing I had ever seen. The letters, though not as beautiful as those written by the scribes in their early days, were big and legible throughout. Every letter was consistent, like someone had been given a divine hand to produce perfect symbols. Every line on every page was straight, evenly-spaced, and perfectly inked.

“How?” I said, suddenly wide awake. I had witnessed the skill with which Johann wrote, and even he could not make such precise works.

“I don’t know!” He exclaimed, smiling with wonder, “I’ll ask the prior when he wakes. It was brought to us from St. Mary and St. John. The letter says they have made hundreds like this!”

******

The printing press, it was called. A simple tray with letters carved into blocks called type became a template full of words that could be applied to a blank page in an instant. In time, we began to make our own from the instructions sent from the St. Mary and St. John friary.

We needed wood, lots of wood. When the stronger friars were sick, I had sometimes been enlisted to help with the axework. It was painful, and before Johann and I had started building the press, I had loathed the task. But in my eagerness to finish our creation, I threw myself into the manual labor, volunteering to join the men on their outings, and even doing it of my own accord when I wanted more than the monastery usually gathered. I grew strong from the furious labor.

And I became precise. We made hundreds and hundreds of blocks, each carefully cut to form dozens of full alphabets. Johann and I would race each other with the hammer and chisel, making page after page after page of type. We became so skilled that eventually, we carved whole passages of scripture onto one block.

I became more like Johann in those days, shunning play and spending every waking hour cutting wood or learning the words which we carved into type. Johann was displeased that I no longer brought him water from the river, but resolved to do it himself, as he did not care for the stuff from the well. It was good enough for me, if not a little bitter, and it was closeby.

******

For five years, it continued like this. God had blessed us with a perfect measure of rain, and as we boys grew stronger, it became easier to tend to the fields during growing season, and so our mother and father would allow me to continue my work at the monastery during the twilight hours.

Whereas my body grew during those five years, Johann’s growth seemed to be concentrated in his mind. He always had crazy ideas which he would tell me during the hours we spent using the press.

“What if the smith could make the type?” He asked me one day. I looked at him as though he had gone mad.

“The smith? He makes horseshoes and swords! How the devil will he make small letters?” I said.

“Watch your tongue, Otto!” Johann scolded, “If the prior hears you speaking that way, we will both be beaten with the switch.”

“I can withstand that old levereter’s weak slaps,” I said, imagining how joyous it would be to turn the switch onto the old man myself. 

Johann opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to think better of what he had planned to say. With a shake of his head, he returned to his explanation.

“If the letters could be carved into a cast, like the ones the smiths use to make swords, then when the steel is poured into the cast, it will make type that is better than our wooden blocks,” Johann explained. His disapproval of our work was painful; I could feel an uncontrollable fury rising in my throat.

“What is wrong with our letters?” I screamed.

“They…” Johann struggled to speak, “They split! They crumble!”

“Everything breaks, Johann! Only God is perfect-”

“Otto!”

I breathed heavily, fists clenched. I had to turn away from him, I could not believe my friend could be so calloused.

Calloused. I had words to say the things I felt now. I felt pride, and though I knew it was a sin, I let it linger. No longer was I trapped in the dark hole that was ignorance.

“Otto…” Johann said calmly. I had forgotten what we were arguing about.

“What?” I asked.

“Are you ill?”

“I’m…”

The rage felt like a haze. The sun was rising within my heart, and the haze thinned out as the light took over.

I had hurt my best friend, my only real companion.

“Forgive me, Johann. I…forgive me,” I said.

For the first time I could remember in years, I left the monastery before the sun completely faded. I needed to go home, so I would not sin in the house of the Lord.

******

My education on the Bible itself began that winter, but it was a cause of great frustration to me.

The friars had taught me to read, and Johann taught me to read well. The word of God, however, was confusing. It wasn't the words and the chapters themselves which perplexed me; those were abundantly clear to me, and thanks to our printing press, not sullied by the Satan-cursed wretches who had not the faith to safeguard themselves against the spells of some hidden hags around a cauldron in the woods.

No, what vexed my soul was what I saw in the words, the deeds, and the hearts of the other holy servants.

“Thou shalt not steal,” The Lord had commanded, and yet infirmarer Ludwig would regularly pinch coins from the patients in the apothecary.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” Almighty God had ordained, but everyone denied their very real sins to the roundsman, or made up tales when it suited them.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife,” Was the clear command, but I could see the lecherous look in the eyes of the abbot whenever he lay his eyes on my mother.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It was the first, the greatest of his commands. Everyone, in both the monastery and the world outside, had committed this sin more often than they had confessed. I had committed this sin…and many others.

Oh Lord, forgive me, I cried. How could I have succumbed to the devil’s allure?

My soul ached. Damnation surely rested upon us. The Son had said that there would be those he would deny that called to him, “Lord, Lord,” but would not receive salvation on that day of reckoning. Had not the apostles and the Lord himself struck dead those who withheld what was due?

******

In the winter of our 17th year, Johann was called to the see in Bonn. He had become an extraordinary man. He would be a bishop, perhaps even a cardinal one day. He was generous, wise, kind, all of the things the Lord had called his servants to be. 

And, I realized, I had loved him. I had wanted him, in a way that a man should have wanted a wife.

“Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate…shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

My love for him was real. I knew it was real. Everything else was becoming as turgid as the mud in the streets of the town square after it had been trodden over by carriage: a stinking morass of dirt, fetid water, and all the waste that the townsfolk simply threw into the street. But Johann? He had stayed faithful. When he sinned, he confessed. When he took the punishments due for his transgressions, he thanked the old hypocrites for their part in helping him walk the path of the Son.

Those decrepit, shriveled serpents. They were not worthy to lay a hand on him. Oh, that they had turned the switch on me. I deserved those lashes, not Johann.

No. He had been a man. It would have been wrong to deny him his righteousness.

My nights had grown sleepless. My heart was a sty of loneliness and grief. The last good man had left the monastery, and all that was left was corrupting sin and its practitioners…and I was one of them.

“God rewards those who persevere,” My father repeated to me. I had confided to him my grief for my beloved’s departure, though I had not revealed how deep the ghost of him haunted me.

“How do I persevere, when there will be no end to the pain?” I asked one night, having grown angry and anguished at his thoughtless words.

“God never promised that your trials would end,” My father said, smiling like he was offering the words of Solomon, “You honor him by remaining grateful for his blessings.”

“I don’t want to go back,” I said. All I could think about was the press, the wicked old men, and the one I loved that would never be there again.

“You have been given a gift, Otto. Your wisdom and your piety are beyond your years. You will bring many to the Lord one day; you have been called to it!”

I sighed.

“Honor thy father and mother, for this is the first command with a promise.”

He was right. Saint Paul was right. I would fulfill my duty to the Lord.

That night, I ran my hands through the dirt of the field. It was soft and rich; the oxen had turned it this very day, and it would soon accept seed. I let the ground coat my hands, let them become the image of what I was, what we all were. Then I took my waterskin, pouring the contents over my filthy, sweaty hands, washing them clean.

******

One of the boys set the metal type into the tray, while the other prepared the ink surface. They would soon spread the word of God, make it ready for more of the Lord’s faithful to receive.

That was good. That was how it should be. They would grow to be fine servants of the Lord, and would receive his salvation on the day of judgment.

I would ensure it.

The axe was still buried in the stump at the base of the hill. It was rusting, and the handle was beginning to splinter and rot, but its edge was still razor sharp. Though it was old, and growing more fragile with each passing year, it too was still faithful. I hefted the familiar tool and took a deep breath.

******

The terror in the lecherous old abbot’s eyes was right, it was deserved.

“My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation,” I said, hands trembling.

The axe gave no resistance when I pulled it from his cleaved head.

One.

That greedy bastard Ludwig was next.