A gift meant to flatter the king

A courtier eager to win the king's favor — and there was never any shortage of these at Vijayanagara — arrived one day bearing a magnificent peacock as a gift, and assured Krishnadevaraya, with the particular confidence of a man repeating something he has not troubled to verify, that the bird would break into a glorious dance the very instant it caught sight of the color red, and that His Majesty need only wave a red cloth before it to be treated to a display worthy of the royal aviary.

A red cloth, and a bird that will not perform

The king, charmed by the idea and not a man to delay his own entertainment, called for red silk to be fetched at once and had it waved, flapped, and paraded before the newly arrived peacock in front of a gathering audience of courtiers — only for the bird to regard the whole performance with magnificent, feathered indifference, refusing to so much as ruffle a tail-feather no matter how energetically the cloth was shaken.

Royal patience runs out

What began as mild disappointment curdled quickly into royal irritation as the demonstration dragged on with no result, and Krishnadevaraya — who disliked nothing so much as being made to look a fool in front of his own court, whether by a peacock or by the man who had promised him one — turned his displeasure on the unfortunate courtier who had made the original claim, demanding to know why he had been sold a bird that apparently could not perform the one trick it had been advertised for.

Tenali steps between the king and an easy punishment

It was Tenali who spoke up before the trembling courtier could offer whatever excuse he had managed to assemble, pointing out — with the calm authority of a man who had clearly spent more time watching actual peacocks than listening to gossip about them — that peafowl do not, in truth, dance for cloth of any color at all, but for the gathering clouds and the first cool wind of the monsoon, mistaking the promise of rain for the promise of a mate, and that no quantity of red silk waved by human hands would ever move a peacock half so much as one real thundercloud.

A misunderstanding explained, not a lie punished

This, Tenali went on, was very likely nothing worse than an honest confusion — someone, somewhere along the way, had noticed peacocks dancing under a reddening monsoon sky and mistaken the color of the clouds for the cause of the dance, and the story had traveled from mouth to mouth, growing simpler and less accurate at every telling, until it arrived at court as a plain and entirely wrong fact about red cloth.

The king laughs instead of punishes

Krishnadevaraya, presented with a natural explanation in place of a deliberate deception, found his anger draining away into amusement at how thoroughly the whole court — himself very much included — had been prepared to believe a piece of nonsense about a bird simply because it had been said with enough confidence, pardoned the relieved courtier on the spot, and remarked that he would rather keep a peacock that danced for real rain than one that performed on command for a length of red cloth and an audience of fools.