The Elephant Stables

The palm-leaf order arrived on a Tuesday, in the middle of the morning, while Elias was adding up how much sugarcane the royal elephants had eaten in the month of Shravana.

It was a great deal of sugarcane. It was always a great deal of sugarcane. Elias had been a junior clerk in the fodder accounts of the royal treasury of Vijayanagara for six years, and in six years the elephants had never once eaten less than the month before.

The treasury's fodder office was a long low room at the back of the royal enclosure, behind the granaries, with a stone floor and a row of small windows high up, and forty clerks sitting cross-legged in two lines with their writing boards on their knees, scratching numbers into palm leaves with iron styluses. It smelled of ink and lamp oil and, faintly, always, of hay, because the fodder carts went past the windows all day long. Nothing ever happened in it. Elias liked it very much.

The order came in the hand of a runner from the palace secretariat, a thin boy in a white turban who walked down the line of clerks reading names off a bundle of leaves, and stopped in front of Elias, and held one out.

"For you," he said, and went away.

Elias looked at it.

It was a proper order. A long narrow strip of palm leaf, the edges trimmed, the lines scratched in a fine official hand and blacked with soot so they stood out, and at the bottom, pressed into a blob of lac, the seal of the palace secretariat: the boar, with the sun and the moon above it. Elias had seen hundreds of orders like it, about grain and hay and the price of salt. Elias had never had one addressed to Elias.

Elias read it.

Then read it again, more slowly, moving a finger under the words.

It said, in the beautiful formal language of the secretariat, that by the gracious command of the king, the bearer of this leaf, Elias, clerk of the fodder accounts, was raised to the post of Deputy Keeper of the Royal Elephant Stables, with immediate effect, and was to present himself before the Head Keeper at the stables before the noon gong. It said there would be a house, and a horse allowance, and a ration of rice and ghee, and a red turban of office. It said the festival of Mahanavami was thirty days away, and the deputy keeper would be responsible, under the head keeper, for the readiness of the royal elephants for the great procession before the king.

Elias put the leaf down on the writing board, very carefully, as if it might bite.

Across the aisle, Lakkamma looked up from her own board.

Lakkamma had sat across the aisle from Elias for four years. She was quick and small and nearly always cheerful, with ink on her fingers to the second knuckle and a habit of humming while she added. She had been moved, last month, from the fodder accounts to the palace secretariat, to help with the festival paperwork, and had only come back this morning to collect a cushion she had left behind.

"What's that?" she said.

"I've been made Deputy Keeper of the Royal Elephant Stables," said Elias.

Lakkamma laughed. Then she saw Elias's face, and stopped laughing, and reached across the aisle and took the leaf, and read it. And went slowly, completely, pale.

"Oh no," said Lakkamma.

"What?"

"Oh no. Oh no, no, no." She held it up to the light from the high window. "I wrote this. That's my hand. I wrote twelve of these yesterday. Postings for the festival. And there was one for a clerk, for the stables, to keep the fodder accounts there during the festival. And there was one for a deputy keeper. A real one. A mahout, a famous one, from Kampili, who's away in the forests catching elephants." She put a hand over her mouth. "I must have swapped the names. On the two leaves. I was so tired. It was so late. Oh, I'm going to be sent to count tigers in the hills. Oh no."

"So I'm meant to be the clerk."

"You're meant to be the clerk."

"And the mahout from Kampili."

"Has got a leaf telling him to keep the fodder accounts." Lakkamma groaned. "When he gets back. If he can read. Mahouts don't always read."

They looked at each other.

"Well," said Elias. "We just take it back. To the secretariat. And explain."

Lakkamma looked at Elias with enormous pity.

"It's sealed," she said. "It's got the boar on it. It's been entered in the great register. It says by the gracious command of the king." She lowered her voice. "Nobody goes to the secretariat and tells them the king's gracious command was a mistake. Not a month before Mahanavami. They'd have to unseal it, and enter that it was unsealed, and say why, and the why would be me, and the master of the secretariat would have to tell the master of the household, and the master of the household would have to..." She shuddered. "It goes all the way up. Everything goes all the way up."

At the head of the room, the chief clerk of the fodder accounts, a stout man with a voice like a temple gong, had stood up and was looking down the line toward them.

"You," he said. "Elias. I hear you've been promoted." He did not sound pleased. He sounded like a man who had just lost a clerk a month before the busiest season of the year. "The noon gong goes in an hour. The stables are on the far side of the royal enclosure. I suggest you run."