'Of all the things you say, only one concerns you: Count Pitti. I assure you he was killed on the beach. For the rest, how I ca - how I obey my orders concerns only me: I am wespons -1 am answerable to my superior officers.'
The apparent calmness of Ramage's voice was such a relief to Pisano that, suddenly finding his tongue, he yelled, 'Poltroon, liar! No doubt you surrendered your ship like the coward you are!'
'I suggest you remove your top clothing and stockings,' Ramage said coldly, disgust giving way to anger. 'The loan of your clothing to help save the Marchesa's life is not an unreasonable request. Shall I call a couple of my men to assist you?'
Pisano stripped off his jacket, waistcoat and lace stock, and flung them on the sand. He stood on one leg to take off a shoe before removing a stocking, fell down, and when he sat up again asked:
'You want my breeches as well?'
'No,' said Ramage, 'that would be too much.'
From the overhanging top of the cliff above Cala Grande Ramage looked down at the bay. There was no sign of the boat, nor where it had been beached: the men had made a good job of smoothing the sand. Below him seagulls were gliding almost motionless on the wind currents, watching for fish.
Until he and Jackson reached the cliff top, Ramage had not realized just how steep were the mountains of Argentario: he'd expected to find Spaccabellezze and Spadino not far above them, with only a gentle climb up to the cleft between the two peaks. Instead there was a steep slope of several hundred yards even to reach where the cleft began curving up to cross the ridge.
He guessed the long ridge continued to his left until it ended at the sea, forming the promontory of Punta Lividonia, and they had to cross it through the cleft to reach Santo Stefano. Jackson pointed to a mule track. It was halfway up the slope, running parallel with the ridge for half a mile before turning upwards to cross it at right angles.
‘Yes,' said Ramage, 'that's the one for us.'
Once the two men reached the track they could look back down the slope and see the edge of Cala Grande. The sea, now the sun had risen higher, was the living blue of a kingfisher's wing feathers.
They came to the end of the level section of track and followed it round to the left, beginning the last part of the climb that would take them over the top of the ridge. Now they passed through cultivated land - if that was not too grandiose a name for tiny terraces jutting out of the hillside, like balconies. The walls of each terrace were made of interlocking stones and built to form three sides of a shallow box, the hill making the fourth side, and filled with red earth. Stumpy grapevines threw out shoots which the peasants trained along low frames of twigs and twine. Already the leaves were a mottled red and golden yellow and Ramage realized the vines were still laden with grapes. They were tiny, their topaz flesh tinged with red, and he had not noticed them at first because they blended with the leaves.
'Look,' he said, pointing.
In a moment Jackson had scrambled up on to the terrace and picked several bunches, which they ate.
'Not too bad - they are wine grapes,' Ramage explained. 'The peasants will pick them after the next rain.'
'What if it doesn't rain, sir?'
'Well, they'll pick them just the same and get less wine: it's the day of rain at the right time that makes all the difference to the harvest.'
Twenty minutes later they reached the middle of the cleft so they were astride the great ridge: on their right was Spadino, on their left the higher and nearer peak of Spaccabellezze. The track in front of them now began to drop down and curve to the left, following round the foot of Spaccabellezze, and for several hundred yards they walked between the high walls of terraces as if in an ornamental maze, and from among the complicated pattern of differently shaped rocks and stones the inquisitive heads of lizards, now turned brown to match the autumn colours, watched them pass with unwinking beady eyes.
Suddenly the walls ended on both sides and the two men found themselves looking down into a valley running parallel with the ridge on which they stood. The effect was dramatic: on the far side was a lower ridge with several more beyond, each higher than the other, so that the land rose and fell in great crests and troughs, like huge petrified waves beating at the foot of Monte Argentario itself.
Just to their right, astride the nearest ridge, was a very tall, narrow rectangular tower, like a thin box standing on end: another link, Ramage saw, in the chain of signal towers round Argentario which led to the fortress of Filipo Secondo in Santo Stefano itself. This one, well inland, was obviously specially built as a centre for those on the west coast, which formed a half-circle round it, like spokes radiating from the axle of a wheel. Most - the larger ones, anyway - were in sight of it, so presumably it could be used as a short cut to Santo Stefano, to save an urgent signal having to be relayed laboriously from one tower to another right round the coast.
Ramage paused for a few minutes, both for a rest and to study the wild, open beauty of the view. The great ridges and plunging valleys were a curious mixture of grey jagged rock and, where the slopes were less steep, geometrically precise plots of terraced land. The lower slopes were criss-crossed with what, in the distance, seemed to be fluffy balls of silver-green wooclass="underline" olive trees, with grapevines growing among them, and between them yielding the oil and wine which were the peasant's life-blood.
'Come on,' he said to Jackson. They began walking again and almost immediately found themselves in an olive grove.
How lovely these slim, silver-green leaves: how twisted, gnarled and tortured-looking the stumpy trees and boughs, as if they symbolized the back-breaking toil that was a peasant's life, whether man or woman, from before puberty to rheumatic old age and despairing death.
Up here, high over the valleys, there was still the buzz of the cicadas, but less insistent than on the beach by Lake Buranaccio; and instead of the all-pervading perfume of the juniper, there were many odd smells: the occasional sour stench of donkey dung and the catmint odour which warned them snakes were near. Surely that was sage - Ramage snatched up some leaves as he passed and crushed them in his fingers. And rosemary - the heavy perfume of rosemary: ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance' - and Ophelia lying on a bed of branches, almost a bier, down in Cala Grande. And that's fennel, and here are daisies. 'I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died' - and, Ramage thought to himself, maybe I'm going mad as well, trotting along here quoting Hamlet to myself. But he realized that if he survived the next day or so he'd understand better Hamlet's desperate sense of loneliness.
As they rounded a bend the land suddenly dropped away in front of them: the main ridge curved to the left, towards Punta Lividonia, while a smaller ridge, like a wide buttress, ran downwards in a series of steps, ending at the sea to form a narrow peninsula separating the two small bays round which Santa Stefano was built.
Two-thirds of the way down the ridge, on a natural flat platform, stood the great, squat sand-coloured fortress of Filipo Secondo. It had a big courtyard on its landward side, nearest them, with wide stone steps leading up to the drawbridge.
In shape, harsh beauty and position it was typically Spanish, and from his position, a hundred feet above, Ramage could see that its guns completely dominated the bays.
La Fortezza di Filipo Secondo - the Fort of Philip the Second: the old tyrant of the Escorial who had launched his Armada against England. Spain's arm had been long in the days of its greatness, whether it held a threatening sword or a plump bride to a state it wanted to add to its Empire.