"Don't tell me if you don't want to; you will tell me when you feel that you can."
He blamed himself for everything: "If I loved her more, this would not have happened!" He was doing himself injustice: he loved all his daughters and Maki more than the rest.
He thought the queen knew, but she did not. The princess's nurse, old Asa, may have suspected something, but she would rather have had her tongue cut off than said anything.
There were strange rumours in the town: it was said that the princess had been seduced by a tramp, a runaway slave or, perhaps, by the Jew Iserker himself; it would not have been very difficult, because the king's daughters were not properly looked after; Princess Makitatona had been seen to go out alone into the desert through the secret gate in the Maru-Aton garden wall. And people added, not without malice, that the Jews were highly delighted, for they thought that the princess would give birth to their Messiah.
The dwarf, Lagu, was brought one day to the palace half dead: he had had a fight with a crowd of street ruffians who were gazing at a charcoal drawing of the princesses made on the wall with an indecent inscription beneath it.
The king allowed Maki to live in retirement in the Maru-Aton palace until her confinement. She spent the days there in a perfectly dark room with the shutters closed and the windows curtained: she could not bear the light. She had had attacks of this disease before: daylight seemed to stab not only her eyes, but her whole body as with a knife; if a ray of sunshine penetrated into the room, she cried and groaned as with intolerable pain.
The eldest princess, Meritatona, or Rita, Saakera's wife, was inseparable from Maki. There was a year's difference between the sisters—one was fifteen, the other fourteen; they loved each other tenderly though they were as different as day and night.
Maki had been betrothed to Saakera, who was passionately in love with her; she loved him, too, but renounced him for Rita's sake and made a vow of virginity to the god Attis. The god's chapel was in the hilly desert not far from Maru-Aton. The droning of the eunuchs engaged in their devotions sounded like jackals howling in the night.
Some ten days after Saakera's feast Maki and Rita were sitting at Maru-Aton late one evening in a long and narrow Water House, supported by palm-shaped pillars with a labyrinth of eleven ornamental pools. Their slanting walls were covered with paintings of water plants, lotoses and papyrus, that seemed to be growing out of water; above them were painted pomegranate bushes and clumps of vine. Beds of living flowers were all round.
Rita and Maki were reclining on pillows by the water's edge, under bushes of white, pink, and red roses.