A rumor of hidden riches

It is a peculiar hazard of being known as the cleverest man at court that people assume cleverness must eventually translate into money, and so it was whispered about the city that Tenali Rama — poet, jester, favorite of the king, forever exchanging witticisms for royal smiles — must surely have accumulated, over the years, a private fortune to match his reputation. Two thieves of modest ambition and considerable credulity heard this rumor, believed it entirely, and resolved between themselves to relieve the famous wit of whatever gold he was supposedly hoarding, choosing a moonless night for the attempt and creeping up beneath the shuttered window of his house to plan their entry in whispers.

A conversation overheard, or perhaps performed

Tenali, whose sleep was never quite as deep as it appeared and whose ear for a whispered conspiracy was one of the more practical benefits of a lifetime spent reading court intrigue, caught the murmur of voices beneath his window and understood at once what kind of visitors he had. Rather than raise an alarm and send them scattering into the dark to try their luck at some less watchful house, he saw a better use for the evening, and began — in a voice pitched just loud enough to carry through the shutters, and addressed with great apparent frankness to his half-asleep wife — a conversation about the family's hidden treasure.

The secret of the old well

He confided to his wife, for the benefit of the two eager ears outside, that the gold he had saved over the years was buried nowhere so obvious as under the floor or behind a loose brick, but lowered instead into the old dry well at the back of the property, wrapped and sealed against the damp, where no thief in his right mind would ever think to look. His wife, catching on at once to the game — for she had lived with him long enough to recognize mischief when it wore the voice of a confession — played her part beautifully, expressing exactly the sort of drowsy, unsuspecting agreement a woman in on no secret at all would offer.

Two thieves descend into the dark

The two men outside needed no further encouragement. As soon as the house had gone quiet, they crept round to the well, and — being thieves rather than engineers — gave no thought at all to how they might get back out again before one of them tied a rope to the bucket-frame and lowered his companion down into the cold, echoing dark to search for the promised gold by touch, while the other waited above, listening to muffled reports of nothing but wet stone and old leaves.

A long, muddy, treasureless night

The search below turned up nothing, of course, because there was nothing to find, and the thief in the well groped through the mud and debris of a dry season for what felt like hours, growing colder, filthier, and more convinced with every handful of silt that the treasure must simply be buried a little deeper, while his companion above grew steadily more nervous about the lightening sky and steadily less willing to admit that the whole venture might have been a waste of a perfectly good night's thieving.

Dawn, and an audience they had not planned for

By the time the sky had begun to pale, Tenali strolled out to the well as though he had merely come to check on his morning water, and found one bedraggled thief still stuck at the bottom and the other frozen with his hand on the rope, both of them too exhausted and too obviously guilty to attempt any story that would explain their presence, and had the considerable satisfaction of summoning the household to come and see what the night had washed up.

A judgment with more laughter than punishment

When the matter was brought before the king, as such things generally were when Tenali was involved, Krishnadevaraya heard the whole story of the whispered secret, the false well, and the long muddy night with evident delight, and rather than have the two thieves flogged as the law technically permitted, sentenced them instead to a public retelling of exactly how they had been fooled — a punishment Tenali considered, on the whole, considerably more fitting than any beating, since a thief who has been laughed at by the entire city is far less likely to try his luck at cleverness again than one who has merely been whipped for failing at it.