Eshaan swept the terrace the next morning as if nothing had happened, because as far as anyone else could tell, nothing had.
Bhaskaracharya had been on his night rounds. well after the lamps in the dormitory had been put out, and saw Eshaan lying on a mat in the open terrace area, deep in his thoughts. He patted Eshaan's head to softly confront him about the matters that were bothering him, and ended up taking a stroll. He was well informed about Eshaan's situation and how special of an individual he is and that is what fascinated Bhaskaracharya.
Next morning, Eshaan has sensed that some shift is soon going to happen in his life and he didn't let it show on his face and simply reset the gnomons, copied the previous night's readings into the logbook in his ordinary hand. When Arjun speculated at midday about who would be called up to the platform that night, Eshaan agreed that it was hard to say, and meant it, because he genuinely didn't know what called up would look like for him this time.
And soon, the time came, just one hour before moonrise.
A junior attendant came running and found Eshaan at the water channel and only informed him that he was wanted at the upper study. Devendra glanced up this time, and something crossed his face that wasn't quite a question, and Eshaan understood that his actions have been so private that everyone around him has started to take notice of it but none dared to say it on his face, or question him.
Bhaskaracharya did not waste time on the walk up.
"You understand what a partial eclipse is," he stated, and moved fast enough that Eshaan had to work to keep pace.
"You do not understand what this one is for."
"For, Acharya?"
"Everything in this observatory is for something, beyond the observatory. That is the part students forget once they've learned enough mathematics to feel pleased with themselves." He didn't slow down.
"Tonight's eclipse falls during a conjunction the court astrologer has already declared inauspicious. Not merely inauspicious, 'ruinous'. He has told the king, in terms I am told were considerably less careful than they ought to have been, that this sky foretells the failure of any campaign undertaken within the season, and worse, that it touches the king's own house directly."
Eshaan said nothing, waiting to see whether he was meant to understand this as gossip or as instruction.
"Divakar Joshi is not a fool," Bhaskaracharya went on, as if answering the question Eshaan hadn't asked.
"He knows the calendar and he knows the omens as they are traditionally read. What he or anyone else outside these walls does not know is that, the timing he is working from is wrong. Not by much. By less than a ghati. But a conjunction read at one hour and a conjunction read at the next are not the same reading, in the old texts he swears by. Move the maximum by less time than it takes to eat a meal, and the entire omen changes character. What he is calling ruin, correctly measured, is nothing of the sort."
"And if no one corrects the measurement—"
"Then a frightened king makes a decision his kingdom cannot afford, on the word of a man who has never once, in thirty years, questioned whether his own tables might be stale."
Bhaskaracharya's voice didn't rise, but something in it sharpened. "Malwa is not a peaceful region at present, Eshaan. There are pressures on it from more than one direction, and a king under pressure listens more closely to omens than a king who is not. I intend to hand him a true reading instead of a convenient one. That requires the timing to be exact tonight."
Bhaskaracharya sighed heavily, "More exact than it has ever needed to be for any observation I have made in this observatory. I am telling you this because you are the reason I believe it can be done exactly, and because you will stand near enough tonight to understand why every ghati matters."
Eshaan and Bhaskaracharya reached the gate which was already propped open.
"Does anyone else know why tonight matters?" Eshaan asked.
"Lilavati. No one else needs to, and no one else will hear it from you." Bhaskaracharya looked at him directly for the first time since they'd started walking.
"There will be a man from the court on the platform tonight. Divakar has sent his own student to witness the observation and carry the figures back himself, so that no one can later claim I altered them to suit my argument. You will not explain anything to him. You will not correct him if he says something foolish. You will hold whatever instrument you are given, and you will be exact, and you will let the numbers do whatever arguing needs doing."
"Understood."
"Good." Bhaskaracharya's hand found his shoulder briefly, the same gesture as the night before, and then he was moving through the gate ahead of him, already thinking about something else entirely.
The platform was busier than it had been for the last eclipse, and colder, the wind carrying a bite that hadn't been there a month before. Lilavati was already at the great arc, checking its alignment with a thoroughness that suggested she'd checked it twice already and intended to check it a third time.
Madhavan and the quiet, bulky senior worked the smaller instruments at the platform's edge.
A stranger stood near the water clocks with his hands folded into his sleeves against the cold: young, perhaps twenty, in the clean ochre robes of a Brahmin household rather than the plainer cloth the Vedha Shala's own students wore. He looked like he has been ordered to watch everything and say little. Eshaan already guessed who this person was before Bhaskaracharya introduced him.
"He is Harihar, the man who had come to learn about the Eclipse." Bhaskaracharya skipped the information that he felt no one except him, Lilavati and Eshaan should know.
Eshaan noticed a flat courtesy between the two who might not like each other's company and worked for opposite factions. "You'll have everything you need to carry back an honest account."
"I'm sure I will, Acharya." Harihar's smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes.
"My teacher only wishes the sky to be read correctly. As, I imagine, do you."
"As I imagine we all do," Bhaskaracharya corrected, and turned away before the pleasantry could develop into anything requiring a longer answer.
Eshaan was given the sighting bar at the second gnomon, and told, in Lilavati's flattest instructing voice, to hold it steady on her mark and say nothing until she asked him for a reading. He did not need to be told twice. He understood, standing there with the cold wind moving across the platform and Harihar watching everyone with polite, patient suspicion, that tonight was not a night to be noticed doing anything except his task, competently, and without comment.
The moon rose full and untroubled, climbing clear of the eastern wall, and for the better part of an hour nothing about the sky suggested it was going to matter to a kingdom.
Then the shadow arrived, and the platform's attention narrowed to a single point in the air.
The trouble began when the water clocks showed a disagreement with each other by a margin too small to notice unless you were looking for it, and too large to ignore if you were exactly measuring it.
Madhavan's eye caught it first, his voice pitched low, aimed at Lilavati rather than the platform generally. "They've drifted apart. Nearly half a ghati between them."
Lilavati's face didn't change, which Eshaan had learned by now meant she was working the problem rather than reacting to it. She crossed to the clocks, checked them against each other, and said nothing for several seconds that felt considerably longer than several seconds.
Harihar had drifted closer without seeming to move quickly at all, it only meant that he wanted to appear merely curious. "Is there some difficulty, Acharya?" he inquired Bhaskaracharya, pleasantly.
"None that concerns the reading you'll carry back," Bhaskaracharya half-heartedly assured, in a tone that closed the subject rather than answered it.
Eshaan kept his hands on the sighting bar and his eyes on the moon and said nothing, because nothing had been asked of him. But the problem sat in front of him the same way the assumption in Bhaskaracharya's lunar method had sat in front of him three nights ago, visible the moment he let himself actually look at it rather than wait to be invited to.
He caught Bhaskaracharya's eye instead of the room's. Just that. A half-second of held attention, deliberately small, but long enough to make Bhaskaracharya's gaze flickering once toward the great arc, then back to him, and something in his expression asked the question aloud without a single word spoken.
"The arc," Eshaan pointed slightly, pitching for Bhaskaracharya alone, barely above the wind.
"The moon's altitude doesn't depend on either clock. Take a reading from it against the last confirmed timing and you'll know how much real time has actually passed. Whichever clock agrees is the one that hasn't drifted."
Bhaskaracharya held his eyes for a moment longer than the answer required. Then he turned, entirely composed, as if the thought had simply occurred to him.
"Lilavati. The arc. Compare it against the last good reading before we lose the maximum."
Nobody on the platform, watching him say it, would have guessed the sentence had come from anywhere but his own mind.
In reality, the thought might have occurred to Bhaskaracharya, but it would have been a bit later and, Eshaan who in his previous life, had worked with different set of tools that were used during the ancient and the medieval times to calculate things related to the sky appeared to fast track it.
Lilavati moved to the arc without hesitation as she had clearly expected to be told something along these lines, though not, perhaps, quite this quickly, and the calculation ran fast and out loud, checked and rechecked between her and Madhavan while the shadow crept further across the moon's face. The second clock, it turned out, had lost time which wasn't much but enough to contribute to the margin of error so, they discarded it, worked the true timing from the first clock and the arc together, and the maximum of the eclipse was fixed, clean, with the margin that mattered.
Harihar had watched all of it with his hands still folded in his sleeves, his expression giving away nothing his teacher would have wanted concealed and nothing that suggested he'd understood exactly what had almost gone wrong, or exactly whose eye Bhaskaracharya had glanced toward before the correction was made.
Almost nothing.
The figures Bhaskaracharya handed to Harihar before dawn placed the true maximum of the eclipse nearly half a ghati later than Divakar Joshi's tables predicted, late enough to move the whole conjunction out of the house his rival had read as ruinous and into one the old texts, by Bhaskaracharya's own reckoning, called merely uncertain. But, it was nothing close to what was predicted and King Vindhyavarman Paramara had feared.
"You may tell your teacher," Bhaskaracharya said, handing over the sealed leaf, "that I would welcome him comparing his instruments against mine, at his convenience, in daylight."
Harihar accepted the leaf with a small, unreadable bow and left before the platform had fully emptied, walking fast in the grey pre-dawn light toward the gate and, presumably, toward the palace.
Meanwhile, Eshaan assumed, as he coiled rope and helped carry instruments back under their covers, that the matter was settled, and the correction would travel quietly into the king's ear the way such things usually did, unremarked upon by anyone below the rank that mattered.
He was wrong about that, and it took less than four days to bring out another big change in Eshaan's life.
The messenger who arrived at the Vedha Shala wore the Paramara colours and did not wait to be shown in properly. He spoke first to the gatekeeper, then to a senior scholar summoned in some haste, and within the hour the entire lower terrace had heard some version of the story, each one slightly different from the last.
The version that settled closest to true was this: Harihar, whether from honesty or from some calculation of his own that had nothing to do with honesty at all, had told his teacher not only that the timing had been corrected, but how Bhaskaracharya had dealt with the error of the two water clocks, all the while looking toward a student before announcing the fix himself.
The most interesting part was that this so-called student was a probationary student whom Acharya somehow treats in a privilege than the others who arrived. No one knew who passed the news to Harihar but, Divakar Joshi, who was furious at being contradicted by a rival he already resented, had made the detail into an accusation rather than let it pass.
"Bhaskaracharya couldn't be trusted at all with the crown's omens if not a qualified scholar but a boy still sweeping floors was quietly correcting the observatory's masters in front of witnesses."
But, King Vindhyavarman was not of the same conclusion as his court astrologer and took this matter as a tale of curiosity, rather than accusation.
Nirvaan read the summons aloud on the terrace that evening, in the same even voice he used for everything, while Eshaan's mind was on the person who noticed their signals and informed Harihar, as from Eshaan's calculations, Harihar couldn't even see him in the dark of the night and so, someone else had leaked this information to Divakar's aide.
"His Majesty Vindhyavarman Parmar," Nirvaan read, "requests the presence of the probationary student Eshaan Shrivastava, at court, at his earliest convenience."
He lowered the leaf. The terrace had gone entirely silent, seven pairs of eyes fixed on Eshaan with an attention he had spent a month carefully avoiding.
Devendra was the first to speak, quietly, not quite able to keep the surprise out of his voice. "You never said anything."
"I didn't know there was anything to say."
Nirvaan folded the summons once, unhurried, and looked at Eshaan, his eyes were surprised, puzzled, demanding answers, all at once.
"It appears," he finally opened his mouth while patting Eshaan's back, "that the gate to end your probationary period has opened rather earlier and further than I expected."