"Now we are ready to fire. An officer points the mortar or gives the inclination. That means it is first trained and then elevated, using handspikes to lift it. The bed bolster is then slid in to keep the barrel at the correct angle. The top of the fuse is cut open - you remember it has a cover of beeswax and tallow - and the mortar is primed with the finest powder.

"Two seamen each take a slow match - these have been burning while hanging over water in the match tub, of course - and wind it round a linstock and stand ready. At the order, one seaman lights the fuse in the shell, and quickly gets clear while the other fires the mortar."

"And away she goes," Stafford commented. "Our shell goes up high in the hair like a lark or a smokin' cabbage with the fuse fizzing away, and then it lands wiv a thump at the enemy's feet. A thump which puts out the fuse, sir!" he added as an afterthought.

"Oh no it doesn't," Paolo said sternly. "There's a note here about that. The fuse burns in air, water or in the earth. No thump is going to put it out."

"Supposing you don't want to fire an explosive shell?" Jackson said. "Supposing you were on land and being attacked by a great mass of men? I've heard something about using shot."

Paolo read through three more pages and then said triumphantly: "Here it is, pound shot. Each shot weighs - well, of course, a pound. You use a two and a half pound charge of powder, and on top of that you put a wooden base. Then you put in one hundred of the pound shot. They're in a bag, I suppose - it doesn't say. Nor does it give maximum ranges. But just think, if the range was 2,000 yards. Imagine being hit with a shot weighing one pound which has just spent the last twenty seconds being hurled through the air. And for the last half," he added with an authoritative note in his voice, "with the force of gravity added . . ."

"Yes, there wouldn't be much velocity left from the charge," Jackson said. "In fact I should think it would be like being hit with a one-pound shot dropped on your head from a cliff a thousand yards high. Less, because you have to allow for the curve."

"The parabola," Paolo said. " 'Amplitude of the parabola' - that's what they call the range in these notes."

"They would," said Stafford sourly. "Makes gunners sound more important and a mortar sound more dangerous to the enemy. But it still sounds to me like trying to kill your neighbour by 'eaving bricks over 'is wall - an' you don't even know if 'e's at 'ome."

Rossi suddenly pointed up at the Calypso's masts. "They're hoisting a signal."

Ramage watched through the glass as the men in the Calypso's red cutter heaved a cask overboard and half a dozen of them leapt into the surf to roll it up the beach. The big cask bobbed and spun in the waves, occasionally knocking a man over as it was pushed towards the line of surf where the sand started. The sun was glaring now, sparkling off the waves and almost blinding along the sand, which was nearly white along this stretch of the coast.

Fifty yards inland the juniper bushes began, then came the umbrella pines, a band of dark green, mushroom-topped trees forming a small elevated plateau. Even out here he could hear the whirring of the cicadas above the lapping of water against the hull, the faint whine of the wind in the rigging, and the slapping of the waves breaking on the beach. The smell of the pines was sharp and clean, the distant buzz of the cicadas continuous and punctuated by the occasional agitated squawking of the terns and the chattering of sandpipers striding along the water's edge like self-important midshipmen. He was once again back in Tuscany with Jackson and Stafford because charcoal was being made nearby, a heavier smell competing with the astringent pines. The pinetas, the charcoal smoke, the wash and gurgle of waves sluicing the sand . . .

He jerked back from his memories and looked through the telescope. The men from the red cutter had rolled their cask up the slope of the sand on to the level section beyond, halfway to the pines. Now they were levering it upright. He swung the telescope round to look beyond the Fructidor, where men from the green cutter were still struggling to get their cask up the sloping beach.

Each cask was exactly fifteen hundred yards away from its nearest ketch - or would be once it was set upright. Kenton had stood on the beach ahead of one ketch and paced out fifteen hundred yards, putting a marker in the sand, then he had done the same for the other. Now each ketch had a target 1,500 yards away, the one for the Brutus to larboard, the one for the Fructidor (he refused to use the whole name) to starboard. Fifteen hundred yards plus the extra two hundred yards or so distance from the ketches to the beach. Pythagoras.

In going over the loading, aiming and firing of mortars with Wagstaffe and Kenton, he had not reminded them of the two hundred yards. Both lieutenants had been given the gunner's notebook to make whatever notes they wanted from the range tables. Both had been told to use up to twelve shells, each charged with four pounds of powder. Ramage had emphasized that they were not to rush; the winner would be the ketch that smashed the cask with the fewest shells, not in the shortest time. From time to time Wagstaffe and Kenton were to go down below and inspect the under-deck stanchions and bracing supporting the mortar beds: he wanted no accidents. The French obviously had confidence in the way they had converted these galliots but... Still, Renouf had handed over his own list of ranges and charges which corresponded to those in the gunner's notes, and Renouf had been given the impression that he would be back on board his ketch, probably in irons, when the mortar was fired, so he would have been vociferous in expressing doubts if he had had them.

Ramage had, in effect, arranged a competition between Wagstaffe and Kenton in which each had an assistant and team: Wagstaffe had the new fourth lieutenant, William Martin, and his prize crew; Kenton would have Paolo, Jackson, Stafford, Rossi and three more seamen. Wagstaffe had gone over to the Brutus confident that he and Martin would easily beat Kenton - and an apprehensive Kenton had gone off to the Fructidor without realizing what allies he had waiting for him. Only

Ramage knew that Paolo had been studying tne gunner's notebook for a couple of hours that morning out of sheer curiosity, long before Ramage had decided on the shooting contest.

Predictably, there had been a great deal of grumbling among the rest of the men in the Calypso when they heard about the contest: they wanted Ramage to call for volunteers or, better still, put the opened pages of the muster book in front of a blindfolded man and let him use a sail needle to pick names - a modern version of the old "pricking" as a way of choosing at random. Each mortar needed six men, so trying to choose a dozen from the Calypso's two hundred was more unfair than saying arbitrarily that the two prize crews would also be the mortar crews.

Aitken had wanted to use both mortars in each ketch, but Ramage viewed the aftermost one with suspicion: if anything went wrong with the shell there was the risk that it would carry away the mainmast or mizenmast, whereas there was little chance of anything being carried away if a shell fired by the forward mortar ran wild like a winged partridge.

The green cutter's men had their cask at the mark left by Kenton and were levering it upright. They stood back to look at it as they slapped their hands against their thighs to get rid of the sand. Now they were running back into the sea and struggling out to the green cutter, whose crew were backing water as the coxswain shouted impatiently. One after another the cask men climbed on board and while the last one was being hauled up, the cutter started making its way back to the Fructidor. Each ketch would have a cutter lying astern on a long painter, just in case of accidents.