Ramage and the Saracens r-17

by Dudley Pope

  "You're assuming they'll be sailing," Ramage said. "Don't forget they have rowing galleys, and a flat calm is just the weather for them to slip along."

  "What sort of speed can they make under oars, sir?"

  "I've no idea. Say five knots, perhaps more. And don't forget they may have fresh slaves at the oars - some of the men they've just captured."

  Orsini shivered even though the sun was still warm. "I still can't get used to the idea of these heathens using Christians as slaves," he said.

  "Remember that while you're keeping a lookout," Ramage said. "When you start feeling sleepy, just think of those slaves chained to the oars."

  At that moment Ramage realized he had nearly made a terrible mistake: he had visualized opening fire on the Saracens' vessels as soon as the killing ground was clear, but if he fired into the galleys he would be killing slaves.

  Well, the choice was a truly dreadful one. If he fired into the galleys to prevent the Saracens escaping, he would kill innocent slaves. If he let any Saracens escape, they would soon be back at their pitiless work of capturing more slaves. Which should it be?

  It was a decision which he had to make, Ramage knew; what was more he had to make it now; there was no delaying until the situation arose, when he would have only seconds in which to decide.

  He turned away from Paolo and walked along the battlements, hands clasped behind his back, his mind a torment. Fire on the slaves or not? Let Saracens escape or not?

  And then, without any further conscious effort on his part, his mind was made up: he would fire at the galleys: the slaves would have to take their chance. When the death of a few of them was put in the scales against the fate of many in raids on the couple of dozen ports still left in Sicily, there was no question.

  That evening Ramage left Orsini in charge at the castle and went with Rennick on an inspection of the gun positions and the seamen in the houses with their muskets. The men were in high spirits; it was the first time they had been on shore for a very long time, and in most cases the Sicilian families were being very hospitable. Although neither could speak the other's language they made do with signs, and the men's rations of salt tack were leavened with helpings of pasta and vegetables.

  Jackson's stable was by far the cleanest. Ramage peered along the barrel of the gun and saw that it was aimed at the centre of the killing ground. The next stable was not quite as clean but, as the gun captain commented, it was probably the first and almost certainly the last time that it had been "mucked out". The man's use of the phrase showed Ramage that he was a countryman; probably a farm labourer swept up by the pressgang. Or maybe, overwhelmed by debt, he had volunteered, knowing that the Navy protected him from the bailiffs for civil debts of twenty pounds or less.

  As he checked the last gun, Ramage decided they were all sited in the best position: the long stretch of quay was wide enough to make a perfect area for the Saracens to straggle over as they made their way into the town, and thus offer perfect targets for the carronades.

  Nearly two hundred seamen and the Marines in the houses took longer to inspect but Ramage found the men had selected the best firing positions. All were prepared to quit the houses and attack the Saracens with cutlasses and pikes as soon as they had fired their muskets.

  Ramage went back up to the castle well satisfied with what he had seen. Rennick obviously knew his job and both Kenton and Martin were making sure that the men behaved themselves in the town and did not wheedle wine out of their hosts. "I've told 'em that any man with the smell of liquor on his breath will run up and down the quay for an hour carrying a hundredweight sack of rocks," Kenton said. "That's increased their appreciation of water."

  Back.at the castle, with darkness almost fallen, he found Orsini and two lookouts. "Just one fisherman in sight," Orsini reported. "It's the same boat that has been out all day."

  "It'll give you good practice," Ramage said. "Watch him as he comes in and it will help you judge distances."

  The Calypso came in sight in the late afternoon of the third day. She was within a mile of the castle when, obviously certain by then that there was no flag flying from the flagpole, she turned seaward again.

  Ramage watched the ship with his telescope and felt a glow of pride: she had a beautiful sheer and the whole shape of the hull was perfectly balanced. The fact was, he admitted to himself, that the French could build better-looking ships than the British, and if the Calypso was anything to go by, faster ones too. It would be interesting to see what became of the Trafalgar prizes. Thanks to the storm which had blown up after the battle, not many of the prizes had survived, but he regretted he did not have the seniority to be given command of one of them. From what he had seen of some of the French 74s, even though they had been mostly hidden by the smoke of the guns, they seemed fine ships: fine sheers, gunports high so that the ships could be fought with a heavy sea running, and with masts that sat in the hulls as though they belonged there.

  The truth of the matter was that the French shipwrights (and Spanish too, for that matter) had perfected that curious blend of science and art that was necessary to design and build a fine ship. It was something that eluded the British shipwrights. It was a fact admitted by honest men that the fastest and most seaworthy ships in the King's service were those captured from the French and Spanish. At least the Admiralty had the honesty to keep the original names - except where they were too similar to existing English names.

  There was, he considered, something very British about the way the Admiralty had kept the French and Spanish names (and Dutch and Danish too), because he could not imagine the French, for instance, retaining the English name of a ship they captured. But just think of the ships at present in commission - the 68-gun Admiral Devries and the 56-gun Alkmaar were originally Dutch; L 'Ambuscade, L'Aurore were former French frigates; then there were the Bienfaisant, Babette, Bonne Citoyenne and Bonetta which were French and the Brakel and Braave Dutch, and that only took him up to ships beginning with the letters A and B. Then came the huge Commerce de Marseille, Caton, Concorde, Courageux, Constance and Cormorant, all French, and the 74-gun Camperdown, Dutch. And so it went on, the Delft, Genereux, Gelykheid, Haarlem, Helder, Heureux, Juste (of 80 guns) and the Impetueux of 78 guns, Imperieuse, Immortalite, right through the alphabet to Vryheid, Virginie, Volage, Voltigeur and Victorieuse and the Spanish El Vincelo. The last three he could remember were Dutch - the Wassender, Wilhelmina and Woorzamheid. And there was, of course, the 110-gun Ville de Paris, built in England. Would it be possible that the French would build a four-decker and name it City of London! The British, he decided, were either very special or very stupid, and he was not at all sure which it was.

  Orsini came up and reported his sleeping quarters were ready. They had swept out a small room - presumably used as a magazine - on the top of the battlements and, after making sure there were no scorpions lurking around in the semi-darkness, they had put down a mattress. Its great advantage was that a cry from one of the sentries brought him on the spot within seconds.

  And now it was dark. The single small fishing boat had come back in, to be welcomed by a group of women on the quay, a sure sign of their need for fish.

  He was startled to hear one of the sentries challenging someone who had come up the track from the town, and pleased to find it was the mayor and a boy carrying pots of food.

  "Supper for you and your men," the mayor explained. "We thought you would have difficulty in getting a fire going up here, so my wife cooked some extra pasta. And there is bread, and water. No wine, as you said."

  Ramage ate his supper with Orsini and after an hour walking right round the battlements, he went to bed, more tired than he ever was at sea: the effect, he thought drowsily, of all the walking.

  He woke up next morning when the mayor and boy - he was the mayor's youngest son - brought them breakfast, a simple meal of which the main course was a chunk of heavy bread. Then Ramage set off down the hill to find Rennick and inspect the men: it would
do no harm for them to know that he was keeping an eye on them.

  The rest of the fourth day passed without incident. The guns' crews exercised at the carronades and the seamen practised charging the quay, watched by wide-eyed children and curious adults. The mayor, who was looking on with Ramage, was most impressed, except that he thought that the Saraceni would probably outnumber the seamen and Marines.

  Ramage explained about the carronades, pointing out that the seamen and Marines would not appear on the scene until after the guns had done their best to clear the quay.

  The Calypso returned on the late afternoon of the fifth day and turned away when she did not see any flag hoisted. Ramage could imagine the disappointment felt by Aitken and Southwick. Impatience rather than disappointment: they would want to get the attack over with, so that they would have no more worry. Neither of them was contented with being left out of the fight; it was in the nature of both men that they could not admit that everything would go off all right without them being present. Ramage pictured Southwick bellowing his way down the quay, whirling his great two-handed sword like a scythe cutting down wheat.

  Two more days: Ramage was sure that the attack would come then, which gave the Saracens enough time to get to their bases and then back again to Licata. There was no reason to expect the enemy to be punctual: Ramage was basing his calculations on the natural urge of the Saracens to finish their raids and settle down to some peaceful feasting.

  Two more days: by then the Calypsos would have been on shore a week. They would have practised handling the carronades and charging the quay enough times that they would know exactly what to do, whether in daylight or darkness. They would have that advantage over the Saracens - they would know the ground while the Saracens would be strangers. Ramage knew it was not much of an advantage because Licata was such a small town. But in the coming fight the advantage would be with the side that could add up a series of small advantages.

  By the sixth day in Licata, Ramage was beginning to feel the start of boredom: walking up and down the battlements and inspecting the men down in the town had its limitations. Up on the battlements he had counted the flagstones innumerable times; he had walked across them stepping on every join; he had walked their length careful to never step on a join. He had counted the lizards looking up at him with beady eyes and had in exasperation chased two or three of them, until one of them dropped his tail and Ramage tired of the sport.

  When he was at sea he sometimes longed for a few days on shore, looking forward to the green leaves, the song of the birds, the lack of rolling and pitching. But Licata was not green, it was parched brown by the sun so that even the lizards were brown, not a lively green, and there were few birds: most had been shot to eat, especially the songbirds, which were so tame. And the damned dust; he forgot about the dust when he was at sea, but here in Licata there was plenty and every whiffle of wind sent up a funnel of it, so that it got in the eyes, the throat and the food. It was bad enough up in the castle: it must be far worse for the men down in the town. But they did not complain; for them the joy of being on shore for a change outweighed any drawbacks like dust.

  Once again a fishing boat went out and tacked up and down in front of the port, and Ramage amused himself by trying to guess the range, but it was a game without a solution because he had no way of checking: his sextant and tables were still on board the Calypso. The fishing boat gave a curious air of normality to the port; as though the quay, houses, church and castle were not complete without a sail to seaward.

  Ramage did not sleep well on the sixth night: he did not seem to be tired and it was hot and sultry. He twisted and turned on his mattress, and a dozen times got up and went outside to chat with the sentries and, several times, with Paolo Orsini. The moon was nearly full and the town seemed covered in menacing shadows. But the quay was lit up clearly; the stone gleamed white in the moonlight. Running figures, the Saracens, would show up well. If and when they arrived.

  When the mayor and his boy brought up breakfast next morning Ramage felt jaded. They had been just a week in Licata and it seemed like a month; the guns' crews were now well trained at the carronades; the seamen and Marines were now used to practising with their muskets and then running down the quay screaming warlike whoops and threats.

  "Well," said the mayor, as he had done for the past few mornings, "do you think they will come today?"

  Ramage shrugged. "Who knows? Today, tomorrow, the day after . . . but, Signor, we are ready for them. The extra days have been useful. The donkeys have been shut out of their stables, but what we have in the stables in their place will be more useful!"

  "That is very true, and the donkeys will come to no harm. Your guns will alarm them when they go off: the banging and the braying will make a noise such as we have never heard."

  "How true," Ramage agreed, thinking too of the screams of the Saracens and the seamen, apart from the rattle of musketry. Licata would have a tale to tell that would be handed down for generations, growing in the telling.

  When he had finished his breakfast Ramage went for yet another walk along the battlements, glad of the exercise..The lookouts, one at each end of the battlements, watched seaward. It was another pleasant day with a good breeze from the south blowing in through the port entrance and puffballs of cloud skimming inland towards the mountains.

  Ramage was now definitely bored; he longed for his cabin on board the Calypso and the walk on the quarterdeck. He would settle, he decided, for a good horse and a vigorous ride inland to the foothills of the mountains, which were greyish blue and fresh looking.

  He gestured to Orsini to join him as they walked. "Is this your first visit to Sicily?"

  "Yes, sir, and I think I've had enough of Licata!"

  "It doesn't buzz with activity," Ramage admitted. "Still, we have a castle to ourselves. In most of the other ports we'd be sharing stables with donkeys."

  Orsini rubbed his wrists ruefully. "I think donkeys would be preferable to these damned mosquitoes. At dawn and dusk they just make straight for my wrists. Look at them!"

  His wrists were badly swollen and covered with the weals of bites. "They seem to affect you more than me," Ramage said sympathetically. "In fact -"

  At that moment one of the lookouts shouted and Ramage saw he was pointing seaward, to the west. And there, black specks on the horizon, were several vessels.

  Were they the Saracens? They had only just lifted over the horizon, and they could be the fishing fleet from one of the neighbouring ports. They could be - until Ramage remembered that the Saracens had taken most of the fishing boats.

  "The church bells, sir?" asked Orsini, but Ramage shook his head.

  "We've plenty of time so let's wait until we're sure who they are."

  He collected his telescope from his little room in the magazine and pulled out the tube, adjusting it to the inscribed line. He started counting. Six... eight. . . eleven . . . and two more were just coming into sight.

  "They're the Saracens all right," he said to Orsini, "but we'll wait with the bells. The town only needs half an hour's warning, and it is going to take those boats another fifteen minutes to get close enough for us to be sure of them."

  "It's a relief seeing them at last," Orsini said. "It was worse just waiting."

  "It always is," Ramage commented. "Anyway, they've come on time."

  Ramage watched with his telescope and finally counted fifteen vessels, and by then the hulls were lifting over the horizon. Half the boats were tartanes, easily identifiable from their sails, three were larger galleys with sails and oars, and the rest were Italian fishing boats, obviously the craft stolen from the ports in the previous raids.

  "Fifteen of them. Say thirty men in each boat. I don't think there will be more because they would leave plenty of room for prisoners. That makes four hundred and fifty men altogether. On paper they outnumber us more than two to one." Ramage was thinking aloud rather than talking to anyone and Orsini kept quiet, watching the approaching
vessels with his telescope.

  Finally, as the fishing boat obviously sighted the oncoming Saracens and hurriedly turned back to port, Ramage told Orsini: "Send off your men to ring the bells."

  Two of the lookouts ran off down the hills and five minutes later the bells began to toll, a lugubrious sound that reminded Ramage of funerals and incense and weeping women and shuffling men in their best suits.

  Finally the bells stopped and by then the fishing boat was nearly back in the port, its crew ready to run for home and load fowling pieces, if they owned them.

  By now Orsini was inspecting the rockets and blowing on the slowmatch. The long wait, Ramage thought, had cost them a lot of slowmatch - almost as much as there had been in the Calypso - but at least they were not now struggling with flint and steel and tinder box.

  The sails of the Saracen boats had more patches than original cloth, but they were driving the boats well as they stretched along in a fine reaching wind.

  Ramage swung his telescope down over the town. There was not a soul on the quay. Nor could he see anyone moving in the town The people had taken the mayor's orders to heart: he had told them that as soon as they heard the church bells they were to go to their homes and, if possible, bar the doors. Many of the houses did not have proper doors: curtains of sacking hung down. This was a poor place and anyway there was little wood about, the only trees being shrubs which were burned for charcoal.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Down in his stable, Jackson walked round the carronade like an anxious hen circling its chicks. "I hope we'll hear the rocket," he said. "Here, Rosey, you station yourself by the door. But make sure you jump back quick when you hear the rocket because I shall fire at once. Almost at once, anyway."

  "You be patient," said the practical Rossi, moving to the door. "If I am to be sure of hearing the rocket I'll be standing only a foot from the muzzle."