Small Lives

"But it's clean," Nell said.

She was holding a cup of water from Saint Orlen's pump up to the lamp, turning it this way and that. Teo had filled a bottle at the trough that morning, with great care, and carried it back to the cellar as if it were full of snakes. Now the three of them were gathered around the table, staring at it.

Nell was right. It was clean. Clearer than river water, clearer than the brewery's beer, clearer than anything else in the Sump. It caught the lamplight and held it like glass.

"Poison is clean too," Teo said. "Some kinds."

"Who would poison a pump?"

"Nobody. That's not what I mean."

He frowned at the cup.

The Leaf had said that the water was the cause. It had not said why. It had not said what was in the water that turned a person's insides into a river and drained them dry. And Teo, who had spent half the night staring at the ceiling of his room, had realised that this mattered. Because if he went to the Chantry and said, "The water from the blessed pump of Saint Orlen is killing people," the first thing any deacon would do was point at a cup exactly like this one and say, "Then show me the poison."

And he could not.

"It must be something too small to see," he said slowly. "Like... like smoke in the dark. It's there, but you can't see it until the light catches it."

Hesk made a small sound. It was not quite a laugh.

"Something too small to see," he repeated. "Do you know, boy, I think there might be a Leaf about that, too. Fetch the green crate."

They spent an hour searching through the green crate before they found it. It was a single, almost undamaged page, with a drawing at the top: a strange little device like a flat paddle of metal, with a tiny hole in the centre, and something held against the back of the hole.

Teo read it aloud.

It was about a man named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth-merchant in a town called Delft, who lived "in the 1670s" and had a strange hobby. He ground glass. More precisely, he made lenses... tiny, perfectly round beads of glass, no bigger than a grain of sand, which he mounted in a hole in a little brass plate and held up to his eye. A lens like that, the Leaf said, could make a thing look two hundred times larger than it was. And with it, the cloth-merchant had looked at everything. Hair. Blood. Pepper. Scrapings from his own teeth. And a drop of water from a rain-barrel.

In that drop of water, he had found a world.

Teo's voice slowed as he read the next part.

"...He described the water as teeming with 'animalcules,' tiny living creatures of many kinds, some round, some long, moving with astonishing speed. He estimated that a single drop could hold more of them than there were people in all of the Netherlands. We now know that many of these were bacteria, single-celled organisms, some of which are responsible for diseases such as..."

Torn.

Of course it was torn.

Teo put the Leaf down very carefully and stared at the cup of water. He suddenly felt rather sick.

"Small lives," Hesk murmured. "Living things, too small to see. Swimming in the water. Getting inside you when you drink." He was silent for a moment. "...It's a terrible thought. And a wonderful one. If they are living things, they can be killed."

"Boiling," Teo said suddenly. "The brewery boils its water. For the beer."

"Yes."

"So the small lives die when it's boiled. That's why the brewers lived." He was on his feet now, pacing. "And... and the Chantry's own wells in the Shelf... they're deep, and they're far from the Sump drains, and the Shelf houses boil water for their tea... that's why the Shelf hardly ever gets the flux..."

He stopped. His mind had caught up with his mouth.

"Hesk. Can we make one? A lens like that?"

The old man's blind face turned toward him, and slowly, a wide, wicked smile spread across it.

"Do you know, cart-man... I was hoping you would ask."

Making a lens turned out to be much harder than reading about one.

The Leaf described the method in a few lines. Draw out a thin thread of clear glass in a hot flame. Hold the tip of the thread in the flame until it melts and curls up into a tiny bead under its own weight. Let it cool. Mount it.

Simple.

...It took them four nights.

The first problem was the glass. There was plenty of broken glass in the Sump, but almost all of it was greenish and full of bubbles, made by local glassblowers who did not much care what it looked like. Teo needed something perfectly clear. In the end, it was Nell who solved that, by vanishing for an afternoon and coming back with the shattered remains of a small, delicate bottle that had once held perfume for some lady of the Shelf. Teo decided not to ask where she had found it.

The second problem was heat. Hesk's oil lamp was not hot enough to soften glass. They tried for hours, and burned their fingers, and achieved nothing. Teo finally managed it by building a tiny furnace from a clay pot and a handful of charcoal, and blowing into it through a hollow reed until his head spun and the coals glowed white.

The third problem was patience. Teo drew out threads of glass that were too thick. Then threads that were too thin and snapped. Then beads that were lumpy, or cloudy, or cracked as they cooled. He made forty-one of them. He counted.

The forty-second was perfect.

It was barely larger than a poppy seed, a tiny drop of clear glass so round that it seemed to swallow the light. Teo held it on the tip of a pin and did not dare to breathe. Hesk pulled a brass button off his own coat... the one at the very top, which had a small hole through its centre for the thread... and Teo pressed the bead carefully into that hole and sealed it in place with a smear of pine resin.

Then he took a sliver of thin glass from the perfume bottle, put a single drop of Saint Orlen's water on it with the tip of a straw, and held it up behind the button, close to the lamp. He brought his eye right up against the bead, so close that his eyelashes brushed the brass.

At first, he saw nothing but a bright blur.

He moved the glass a little closer... a little further... and then, quite suddenly, the blur cleared.

Teo stopped breathing.

The drop of water was alive.

It was full of things. Moving things. There were tiny rods that wriggled. There were round specks that spun and drifted. There were long, thin shapes that whipped back and forth with something like purpose, darting through the bright field of the lens and vanishing at its edges. Dozens of them. Hundreds. More than he could count — and Teo, for the first time in his life, did not even try to count them.

He just stared.

"...What do you see?" Hesk asked quietly, after a long while.

Teo lowered the button. His hand was trembling.

"I see a city," he said hoarsely.

Then he looked at the cup of water on the table. Clear, clean, sparkling Saint Orlen's water, the sweetest in the Sump. The water he had been drinking his whole life. The water Nell's mother had walked across the square to fetch for her every morning.

'...I'm never drinking anything again.'