“Theron the executioner?” said Hildebrand. “I thought your honest father had no use for such shedders of blood.”
“In the very madness of truth, he had not,” Robert answered. “So this rogue has rusted here idly through a generation of eating and sleeping. Very likely his sword is grown with ivy. But now he must stretch his sinews, now he must scour his scimitar, now he begins to be briskly busy.”
Robert drew from his thumb his massive gold signet-ring and handed it to Hildebrand.
“Knock at his door. Show him my signet-ring and tell him to speed at once to Syracuse, to my palace, for the beheading of my court-fool.”
Hildebrand, weighing the great ring in the cup of his hand, stared at his master.
“Have you caught the runagate?” he questioned, “and do you, indeed, mean to divide him so dismally?”
“I have not caught him yet,” said the King, with a frown; “but when I do I will halve him and set up his head on a spear in Syracuse market-place, as a warning to all who cross my pleasure.”
Robert emphasized the word “all” so unpleasantly that Hildebrand hastened to excuse himself from any suspicion of sympathy with the offending jester.
“You may carve him into cutlets, for all I care,” he said. “He was a ribald thing, and deserves no pity.”
He advanced towards the mosque as he spoke, while Robert screened himself from view behind one of the pillars of the ruined temple.