A dream too beautiful to let go

One night King Krishnadevaraya dreamed of a palace unlike anything built by human hands — its walls glittering with precious stones that caught light from no visible sun, its halls impossibly vast, the whole structure floating serenely above the earth as though gravity itself had granted it an exemption — and the dream took such a hold on him that he woke the next morning not simply charmed by the memory but genuinely determined to have the palace built exactly as he had seen it.

An impossible commission handed to the court

He summoned his architects and craftsmen that same day and described the floating, glittering palace of his dream in exhaustive detail, commanding them to begin construction at once and warning them, not entirely in jest, that failure to produce it would not be received kindly — a demand that left every builder in the room privately certain the king had lost his senses and none of them remotely willing to be the one to say so to his face.

Ministers turn to Tenali in despair

The court's most experienced craftsmen and ministers, having quietly confirmed among themselves that no earthly material could be persuaded to float unsupported above the ground regardless of how skillfully it was cut or how generously the king was willing to pay for it, went in a body to Tenali Rama, the only man among them with a track record of talking the king out of his more elaborate notions without ever seeming to contradict him, and begged him to find some way out of the impossible commission before someone was punished for failing at a task no builder alive could actually accomplish.

A week's grace, and a plan taking shape

Tenali asked the king for a single week to make the necessary preparations for so grand a project, a request Krishnadevaraya — pleased that his poet, at least, seemed to be taking the matter seriously — granted without objection, and spent the week that followed not gathering stone or workmen, but assembling instead a disguise: the robes, the wild grey beard, and the stooped, deliberate walk of a very old and very wise hermit, the kind of figure no king would think to question on sight.

A mysterious old man appears at court

On the appointed day, an ancient, white-bearded stranger shuffled into the royal court leaning heavily on a staff and asked, in a cracked and reverent voice, to see the king who had been granted the extraordinary privilege of dreaming of the celestial palace of the gods themselves — a palace, the old man explained, that existed nowhere on earth and could be reached by no mortal road, being visible only to those souls the heavens had chosen to favor with a glimpse of it in sleep.

A revelation, and a familiar face underneath

The king listened, fascinated and increasingly uneasy, as the old hermit explained with great solemnity that no builder alive could raise such a palace from earthly stone, since what Krishnadevaraya had seen was never meant to be built at all, only dreamed of and cherished as a sign of heaven's regard — and then, before the king could fully absorb the weight of this, the ancient stranger reached up, tore away the false beard and the stooped disguise in one motion, and stood revealed as Tenali Rama, bowing low before his thoroughly astonished sovereign.

A king forgives the trick, and drops the demand

Krishnadevaraya's first reaction was a flash of genuine anger at having been so thoroughly fooled in front of his own court, but it passed quickly into something closer to relief and, finally, laughter, as he understood exactly what Tenali had spared him — a kingdom's worth of wasted labor and a great deal of quiet ridicule chasing an impossible dream — and rather than punish the deception, he thanked his poet for having the courage to cure him of his own fancy in the only way likely to actually work, and let the matter of the floating palace rest exactly where it belonged, in the dream that had produced it.