The summons said, "at his earliest convenience," which Bhaskaracharya read once, snorted at, and set down on the table between two half-finished planetary charts.
"Convenience," he said somewhat mockingly. "As if I have any."
Eshaan and Bhaskaracharya answered the call two days later anyway. Eshaan has observed Acharya enough to know that king's patience didn't matter to him much but it was a rouse so he could plan a few things ahead of the audience. Bhaskara was also a courtier at the King's court and so he had to dress appropriately, unlike his plain clothes that Bhaskaracharya wore at the Vedha Shala, he dresses neatly in a clean formal dhoti with a matching angavastram that rested across his chest.
In the morning, Lilavati brought Eshaan a fresh pair of formal clothes that looked like something to be worn at an important ceremony. He quickly changed into them and Lilavati walked with them to the gate, which she usually never did. She circled Eshaan once like she was checking a construction for a bad angle, reached out without asking, and re-tied the knot at his shoulder so it sat flatter.
"Bow when the herald bows. Not before it."
"I know."
"If the king stops talking mid-sentence, that isn't a silence for you to fill. Kings pause on purpose. It's a habit they get taught before they get taught to read." She stepped back, looked at the knot again, decided it would do. "And don't grovel. He's had a hall full of that since sunrise. He won't thank you for adding to the pile."
Devendra was at the gate too, holding two empty buckets for no reason either of them bothered to mention. He didn't wish Eshaan luck, but instead whispered something,
"Find out if the palace kitchens are as good as they say,"
"I'll ask."
"That's all I need." He turned around and went back toward the terrace like the conversation had never been about anything else.
The Palace was located in the city's northern quarter, close enough to the river that Eshaan could hear the Shipra again once they'd come down off the observatory's high ground which actually ran between carved landings and stone ghats instead of open bank. The walls of the palace were whitewashed, and freshly kept, higher than anything Eshaan had stood under since Pataliputra.
There were two gates that led to the palace, a smaller one without any commonfolk and a larger one with the commonfolk lining up. Guards stood along the base at regular intervals that looked organized.
"Say what's true," Bhaskaracharya told, not looking directly at Eshaan.
"And Divakar Joshi?"
"Will be there. He asked to be, and Vindhyavarman likes watching two dogs snap at each other more than he lets anyone believe." A short, dry huff, almost a laugh. "Give him nothing to bite down on."
Eshaan simply nodded at the information thrown at him and looked at Bhaskaracharya who crouched a little, and whispered,
"You must wait here, and I have to go now. I hope you will keep the things I told you in your mind." And went inside through the smaller gate.
Eshaan waited patiently for his name to be called out by the Herald, which came a bit later after Bhaskaracharya left. He went through the courtyard into an antechamber tiled in a pale, cool stone that made his bare feet ache pleasantly after the walk.
"Why am I suddenly feeling nervous?" Eshaan thought as he started sweating.
After this a series of thought followed and flowed inside, 'I am meeting a real king for the first time.' 'what does he want?' 'Should I be worried?' 'Should I just run away?' 'A real king of medieval India...'
Eshaan clutched his hands together as they started shaking uncontrollably, he couldn't tell if it was out of curiosity, excitement or sheer pressure and nervousness. The doors to the court opened before him, and he took a deep breath to calm himself before entering after a countdown of three.
The hall was smaller but, brighter than Eshaan had pictured. High windows threw long pale bars of sun across a floor polished to a shine that made the whole room look wet. Vindhyavarman Paramara sat at the far end on a seat with a raised platform, just enough to tell the room, who's the most important.
Eshaan didn't let his face show, but he checked upon the king, who was dressed rather plainly for a king, a man somewhere in his forties with a beard gone grey at the corners and a trained pair of eyes that moved over the room to keep a check. A carved screen ran along the gallery above the hall. Behind it, two women sat with the servants standing, one seemed like the wife of the king and other, the daughter, who coincidently seemed like the same age as Eshaan.
Eshaan wasn't able to contain his curiosity and met the eyes of the king's daughter behind the veil and for a moment everything stopped as his heart skipped a beat, it wasn't out of love but, a thought, "I have seen these pair of eyes, somewhere."
Eshaan didn't ponder upon the thought and gazed at the next person who looked elderly, around the age of Bhaskaracharya but in a more brahmin attire, 'Divakar Joshi'. He stood near the front of the assembled courtiers, his face arranged into the sort of blankness that took real effort to hold.
Eshaan bent in a half bow when he felt that the gazes of king and the courtiers has been on him for too long. He stayed down until the king's small nod let them both up.
"So." The king's mouth tipped sideways, and whatever was in it wasn't manners. "This is the rumoured boy?"
"Eshaan Shrivastava, Your Majesty. Probationer at the Vedha Shala."
"Probationer." Vindhyavarman repeated the word like he was turning a coin over to check the stamp on the back. His eyes came to rest on Eshaan directly. "And yet I'm told that you are the one who secretly proposed the solution to Acharya here, that led to the correction of the time."
Eshaan's gaze fell on Bhaskaracharya who gave his approval with a simple nod.
"It's so, Your Majesty."
The king looked at Eshaan from top to bottom, his attire was formal, ordinary but, something felt different about this boy. Eshaan sensed the king's gaze and further his reply,
''It was the same thing three weeks earlier, Your Majesty, when Devi Lilavati set me a proof I already knew a different way to solve, and forbade me the way I knew." He kept it plain. "I looked at what was actually in front of me instead of waiting to be told I was permitted to."
Something close to a laugh moved through the king's face and didn't quite make it out his mouth. "Tidy answer. Whose son learns to give tidy answers that young?"
"My father is Mahesh Shrivastava, Your Majesty. Head clerk to the Samanta of Pataliputra."
"A clerk's son." If anything the king leaned further forward, forearms on his knees, "That explains the discipline. It explains nothing about the mathematics, and it explains still less why a clerk's son from Pataliputra is standing in my hall instead of his hometown."
"Your Majesty, I wanted a tutelage under the revered Bhaskaracharya so, I travelled a long way under Acharya Kripa." Eshaan decided to keep his answers short instead of explaining everything.
The name did something to the room that the mention of his father hadn't. Two of the older courtiers traded a look over each other's shoulders. The king sat back, slow, as if recalculating his set of words.
"The Travelling Sage." A dry edge came into his voice that hadn't been there a moment before. "I've never once met the man but, have met three separate scholars in this court who swear on their family names that they studied under him, and every one of them goes strangely vague the instant I ask what, precisely, he taught. So, what did he teach you?"
Eshaan sensed the amusement dying and replacing with suspicion. "A great many things I'm still finding the use of, Your Majesty." Eshaan let a beat pass before he added, "And how to walk a very long way without complaining about my feet."
That one landed perfectly. The king's eyes shone again and his laugh which was short reached his eyes. It also rolled through the courtiers a half-step behind him, suggesting a code that was followed in the court.
"A clerk's son," the king finally said, "tutored by the travelling sage, whom not many had seen, lands at my Acharya's Vedha Shala, even goes as far as to guide him through a careful observation."
King Vindhyavarman shift his gaze towards Bhaskaracharya who immediately stood up and took the centre stage beside Eshaan. The king immediately asked him, "Acharya, is this for real or a story that you simply made out of necessity"
Bhaskaracharya bowed, "Your majesty, I don't deal in stories... I am just a humble mathematician. And, about this young boy... he is only stating facts."
Bhaskaracharya's voice stayed flat, almost bored by the question. "I built the boy's examinations myself before I took him on, even provisionally. What happened on the platform three nights ago wasn't luck. It was the same thing, done in worse light, with less time to do it in."
Divakar Joshi, who had been clearly waiting for a perfect opportunity, walked at the centre and addressed Bhaskaracharya with the king's permission.
"Then let him prove it now, Your Majesty, rather than merely being spoken of so warmly." His voice slid smooth across the hall, pitched for every ear in it. "A boy who corrects the heavens by lamplight, his teacher's hand at his shoulder, might do a great deal, but, he could never manage standing alone, in daylight, before witnesses who owe him nothing at all."
The king's eyes came back to Eshaan, and the warmth in them had gone somewhere else entirely. "Fair, whatever his reasons for saying it." He lifted two fingers, and an attendant stepped forward with a wax tablet already prepared, plainly readied before Eshaan had even walked in. "My treasury took grain tribute from four districts this season. The sum recorded doesn't match what the four districts individually claim to have sent. Can you tell me how would you find where the fault lies?"
"No palm leaves allowed for calculation," Divakar hurriedly added.
Eshaan looked down at the tablet. There were four figures and a stated total beneath them. It took him three moments to see the problem with it. One of the four numbers had been altered after the wax had already begun to set, the strokes sitting at a slightly wrong depth against the ones around it.
Eshaan peeked up from the tablet and looked at the faces of King Vindhyavarman and Divakar Joshi, and decided to not point out the error but, solve it differently. He very well knew that naming a forged tribute figure aloud, in open court, on his first day inside it, would end badly for every single person in the room, Bhaskaracharya worst of all.
"Your Majesty, I wouldn't start with the arithmetic at all. Four true figures always sum correctly to their own total. If they don't, the fault was never in the adding, and it's in one of the four figures itself, before anyone ever summed anything." He kept his eyes on the tablet rather than on Divakar.
"I'd have each district's collector give his own tally again, alone, without seeing the others' numbers or the total already written here. Whichever figure comes back different, that's the one that was wrong to begin with. Or made wrong on purpose."
The hall went very quiet. Vindhyavarman studied the tablet a moment, then Eshaan, and whatever had been amused in his face before was gone from it now, replaced with something considerably more careful.
"That isn't an answer about arithmetic."
"No, Your Majesty."
"You saw there was something on this tablet nobody told you, and found a way to say so without putting a name to it."
Eshaan said nothing. It was the only answer he had left that wouldn't cost anyone anything.
The king set the tablet down himself, unhurried, and looked past Eshaan, toward Bhaskaracharya, though the words that came next were plainly meant for the whole room and one man in it especially.
"The boy may remain under your tutelage at your observatory for as long as you judge it necessary, Acharya. But, once a week, he's welcome in this hall whenever you bring him, as he is now my subject until he is in my Kingdom."
Vindhyavarman's eyes flicked once toward Divakar Joshi, whose careful blankness had cracked into something rigid. "I trust that settles this matter entirely?"
The king again looked at Eshaan and rose from his seat smiling and with him, the whole court stood and bowed deeply. Eshaan also bowed but, he could feel the eyes of the king until he left his hall.
Vindhyavarman hurried towards his wife, Sulekha who was sitting by the window, a length of unfinished embroidery in her lap that she wasn't working on. She had clearly been sitting there long enough, waiting for her husband's return, as though she was present at the court, she loved hearing how her husband depicted the events.
"Well," she said, without turning. "I'm told you found your rumoured boy."
"I found something." He sat heavily on the low couch across from her, "Eleven years old, Sulekha. Perhaps twelve, he stood in that hall with Divakar trying to bait him into naming a forged tribute figure in front of the whole court, and the boy found a door out of it I hadn't seen myself until he'd already walked through it."
"You sound almost offended."
"I am, a little." That got him a real smile out of her, the first one all day by the look of it. "I have sat through a great many audiences designed to flatter me, wife. I know the shape of a story built to be pleasing. This wasn't that. Bhaskaracharya doesn't flatter anyone, least of all me, and the boy answered like he'd already forgotten I was the one asking."
"And Divakar?"
"Divakar left convinced he'd been made a fool of, which he was, and will spend the next month deciding whose fault that was besides his own." Vindhyavarman rubbed at his eyes. "He won't come near me with it directly. He'll go around, the way he always does. That's a problem for another week."
Sulekha set the embroidery aside entirely now, "Our daughter watched the whole audience from the gallery, even after I left after having a look at the boy."
"I saw her staying but, didn't ask her to leave. After all, she is the reason."
"You know, she isn't the one to take interest to someone, that's a first."
Vindhyavarman was quiet for a moment, looking at the lamp between them rather than at her. "I want him here, Sulekha. I mean I want to know, ten years from now, whether the mind I saw today grew into something a kingdom under this much pressure actually needs, or whether it curdled into something Bhaskaracharya's observatory couldn't hold and nobody was watching closely enough to catch."
He turned the ring on his second finger out of habit, "Malwa cannot afford to discover in fifteen years that the one sharp mind in it belonged to someone we let walk past us at eleven because he was inconvenient to notice."
"So you'll have him watched?"
"I'll have him known," he corrected, "There's a difference, and I intend to keep to the right side of it. But yes. Watched, also." He raised his voice slightly, , and a moment later it opened on the Amatya who'd been waiting exactly where Vindhyavarman had known he would be.
"Ratnakar. Sit." and the minister sat, folding his hands.
"The boy from this morning's audience. Eshaan Shrivastava, probationer at the Vedha Shala under Bhaskaracharya." Vindhyavarman said it plainly, "I want someone placed near him, someone ordinary, who can tell me, every month or two, what he's studying, who he speaks to, whether Bhaskaracharya keeps his word about how he's raised."
"And if Acharya discovers it, Your Majesty?"
"Then he discovers a king who takes an interest in a promising subject, which is no crime, but, try to avoid the eyes of Acharya so, choose someone patient and elusive. This isn't a matter I expect answers from quickly. I suspect, Ratnakar, that we are watching the slow part of a much longer story, and I would rather not arrive at the interesting part of it having missed how it began."
Ratnakar bowed his way out. Sulekha waited until the door had shut fully before she spoke again, her voice gone quieter, less a queen's now than a mother's.
"And if our daughter's interest turn out to more than just simple interest?"
Vindhyavarman sighed deeply as he didn't have a ready reply to that question. He looked toward the window instead, toward the dark shape of the Vedha Shala's upper platform just visible above the northern wall, a single lamp still burning somewhere on it.
"Then that," he said finally, "is a problem I will also have a great many years to watch arrive."