The Elephant Stables

The palm-leaf order arrived on a Tuesday, in the middle of the morning, while Mara 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. Mara 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. Mara 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 Mara, and held one out.

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

Mara 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. Mara had seen hundreds of orders like it, about grain and hay and the price of salt. Mara had never had one addressed to Mara.

Mara 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, Mara, 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.

Mara 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 Mara 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 Mara.

Lakkamma laughed. Then she saw Mara'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 Mara. "We just take it back. To the secretariat. And explain."

Lakkamma looked at Mara 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. "Mara. 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."

Mara looked at Lakkamma. Lakkamma looked back, pleading.

"Just for a few days," she whispered. "Till the man from Kampili gets back. Then we'll find a way. I'll think of something. I always think of something."

This was not true. Lakkamma had never in four years thought of anything except the next sum. But she looked so frightened that Mara could not say so.

Mara gathered up her writing board, and her bundle of blank leaves, and the small cloth bag Mara kept her midday rice in, and stood. Forty clerks stopped scratching and looked up.

"Good luck," said somebody.

"Mind the back end," said somebody else, and the whole room laughed.

The royal enclosure of Vijayanagara was the size of a small town, and Mara had to cross most of it.

Mara went at a trot, with the writing board under one arm, past the granaries and the treasury and the long walls of the palace kitchens, which smelled of tamarind and smoke. Past the great square stone platform where the king would sit to watch the festival, with its carved sides showing horses and hunters and dancing girls and long lines of elephants, all of them, Mara noticed, walking calmly and in perfect order. Past the stepped tank, and the guards at the gate of the inner enclosure, who glanced at Mara's order and waved Mara through with grins that Mara did not like.

Beyond the walls, the city went on in every direction: temples and bazaars and houses and gardens and canals, under a hot white sky, among the strange enormous boulders that lay everywhere around Vijayanagara as if some giant child had been playing with them and gone home without tidying up. Somewhere, very faintly, something trumpeted, long and loud and annoyed.

Mara came round the corner of the last wall, and stopped.

The Royal Elephant Stables stood in their own walled court, a long building of cut stone and plaster, with a row of eleven tall arched doorways along the front, each one big enough to drive a hay cart through, and above each doorway a dome. Eleven domes, in a line, some round, some ribbed, some with little lanterns on top, like a row of enormous stone turbans. It was the most beautiful building Mara had ever seen. It was also, Mara realised, as a smell rolled across the court like a warm wet wall, the most elephant.

In front of the middle doorway, an old man was sitting on an upturned basket, peeling a banana, in no hurry at all.

The noon gong sounded from the palace, long and deep.

The old man looked up at Mara, and smiled, a wide, delighted, entirely welcoming smile.

"Ah," he said. "There you are. Good, good." He took a bite of banana. "Now. Who are you?"