Some of the bodyguards rushed at Issachar, intending to kill him on the spot, but the others saved him at the orders of Mahu and Ramose; only these two had kept their presence of mind amidst the general confusion and remembered that, before putting the criminal to death, they ought to find out from him whether he had any accomplices. Issachar was taken to the prison and cross-examined, but he said very little; he did not give anyone away and only confessed that when he raised the knife to strike the king he had a vision. He would not say what the vision was and only muttered to himself something in the Jewish language about their King-Messiah and repeated senseless words "they shall look on Him whom they pierced." But he would not explain who was pierced and then grew silent altogether.
Torture was forbidden by royal decree in the holy province of Aton, yet considering the importance of the occasion they had recourse to it all the same. But neither antelope lashes nor hippopotamus scourges could untie Issachar's tongue. Mahu and Ramose had to give him up at last.
On that same night he was taken ill with something like brain fever—or pretended to be. Fearing that the criminal might die before the execution Ramose hastened to ask the king for a death penalty had been abolished in Aton's province. And when Ramose suggested that the criminal should be moved to some other province and executed there, the king smiled and said, shrugging his shoulders: "there is no deceiving God, my friend! This man wanted to kill me here—and here he must be judged."—"Not judged, but pardoned," Ramose understood and was indignant; he decided to put Issachar to death secretly by the hands of the gaolers. But he did not succeed in this either: the old gaolers were replaced by the new who had received strict orders to preserve the prisoner's life.
Issachar soon recovered from his real, or pretended, illness. The king who had had an epileptic fit after Issachar's attack on him and was still far from well, visited the prisoner and had a long peaceful talk almost alone with him: the guards stood at a distance; and a few days later it appeared that the prisoner had escaped.
The three elder princesses, Maki, Rita and Ankhi, helped the queen to nurse Dio; it was from them she heard of the city rumour about the king having himself helped Issachar to escape; it was said that the man had not gone far but was hiding somewhere in the town waiting, perhaps, for a new opportunity to take the king's life.
"The king has now shamed the faces of all his faithful servants because he loves those who hate him and hates those who love him!" Ramose cried when he heard of Issachar's escape, and he recalled the words of old Amenhotep the Wise, the tutor and namesake of the king's father: "if you want to please the gods, sire, and to cleanse Egypt from corruption, drive away all the Jews!"
"The darling Hippopotamus is right," Ankhi concluded—she called Ramose 'hippopotamus' because of his being so stout—and suddenly she clenched her fists and stamped almost crying with anger. "Shame, shame upon all of us that the vile Jew has been spared!"
Dio made no answer, but the thought flashed through her mind "we are related by blood now, but blood, both his own and other people's is like water to him!" And though she immediately felt ashamed of this thought a trace of it remained in her mind.
The king often came to Maru-Aton, but the queen seldom allowed him to see Dio, especially during the first, difficult days: she knew he was not clever with the sick. His conversations with Dio were strangely trivial.
"Why is it I keep talking of trifles?" he wondered one day, left alone with her. "Is it that I am growing stupid? You know, Dio, sometimes I am awfully stupid, ridiculously so. It must be because of my illness...."