Orsini gave an involuntary shiver. "There's not much advantage in being an Italian these days."

Ramage shrugged his shoulders and said with deliberate harshness: "It is no advantage - in the Mediterranean, anyway - being anything but French. We'll change that eventually, but it'll take time. Until then, people like these fishermen are going to snub you. Be thankful it's only a snub: it could be a pistol ball in the back."

Ramage walked a few paces to one side and looked at the column, led by Gilbert and Louis in the sober uniform of the army of Revolutionary France, who were followed by Orsini and Rossi in their garish outfits. Then the hostages, with Aitken, Jackson and Stafford in the front row. All the hostages were by now apparently chained to each other: a suspicious French guard would have to tug a chain to discover that the "prisoners" were holding their manacles.

And there, at the rear, muskets over their shoulders, pistols in their belts, and swords hanging from belts over their shoulders, were the other two Frenchmen, Auguste and Albert.

Ramage nodded: yes, it all looked realistic enough, a few more hostages being delivered, to be added to those already (he hoped) in Castello: sign this receipt please . . .

Except it was all a waste of time; there were no hostages in Castello; Castello had a garrison of a few French soldiers, probably the scoundrels that various company commanders had been wanting to be rid of since they first crossed the Alps . . .

The winding track began beside the last house, and Ramage could see how it twisted and turned as it snaked the fifteen hundred feet to the top of the mountain, where the gate of Castello, a town gate in fact, waited like a dark mouth to swallow them.

Over a hill, down into a small valley and up again ... the men whose feet had worn the track in the rock over the centuries had been concerned with finding the easiest route for themselves and their donkeys, tired from an exhausting day's labour under a scorching sun.

A scorching sun . . . yes, the sun was already getting some heat in it. He raised his arm, saw that he had everyone's attention (so that he did not have to shout an order), and with an overhand motion started the column marching.

Three dark-eyed, black-haired children watched from a doorway; a woman appeared at a window, moving aside the sacking that covered it. She was holding a baby, and she spat before pulling the sacking back. A black and white cat streaked across the road, chased by the same four dogs. The cat made for the nets and the old woman turned and picked up a stone, but the dogs had obviously played this game before and suffered from the woman's markmanship because they bolted back behind the houses.

"They are poor, these people," Rossi said, as if to himself. "I've never seen a thin cat in a fishing village before . . ."

The track led out of the little port and then passed half a dozen more small stone houses and an equal number of tiny little buildings with half-doors.

"Mamma mia, even the donkeys live as well as the cristiani" Rossi said. "The donkey huts are as well built and roofed as the houses."

"You've lived in a city too long," Ramage said. "If you had been a contadino instead of a ladrone in Genova, you'd know that in the country a man values his donkey as much as his wife."

"In Volterra, more than his wife," Orsini said.

Rossi, although not disputing Ramage's taunt, thought for a few moments. "It makes sense," he said matter-of-factly. "A wife can't carry a couple of barrels of wine, or a load of firewood."

"No," Orsini said. "Just one barrel, or half a load of wood. And the baby slung over her shoulder, and two more clutching her skirt."

The track started to lead up over the first hill. Castello, Ramage thought, seemed to be floating above them on great petrified waves, the rock lightly dusted with red soil. Grapevines and olive trees planted in well kept terraces grew in even lines, the olive leaves already silvery in the early sunlight. Suddenly (although the noise must have been there since daylight) he became conscious of the fast, highpitched buzzing rattle of the cicadas, and perhaps because he always associated them with the sun, he began to feel the heat through his coat.

Who would be a soldier, with all this marching? One could join a cavalry regiment (given the choice) but horses meant aching thighs, tight breeches, and fellow officers with hearty, back-slapping manners, and anyway a horse tended to break wind at awkward moments, such as when the colonel's lady was patting it. That sort of thing, he was sure, could blight a young subaltern's career.

So, heigh-ho for the life of a sailor. Flogging to windward through heavy seas, sheets of spray and curtains of rain, clothes never dry for a month, always eating salt tack, and the knowledge that foreign climes, so often written about ecstatically by poets, could mean the black vomit, ague, typhoid and the plague; that the thunder of broadsides, also written about by poets, could take your head off, or part you from a beloved and trusty leg. Or you could drown. There was, he reflected, a lot to be said for living the life of a landowner, riding to the hounds once a week - and having a horse refuse a hedge, so that you made the jump alone, head-first, and broke your neck. I must write about it in my Journal, Ramage thought; the happy thoughts of a post-captain marching up to Castello . . .

"It's quiet here, sir," Gilbert said unexpectedly, his French voice jerking at Ramage like a leash. "If there was a large garrison up there -" he nodded towards Castello, now going out of sight behind yet another hill, "- I'd expect to see a soldier coming down to buy fresh fish for the commandant, or one of the bad girls of the village returning home after a night... well, after visiting a friend up there."

"A bit early for the trollops," Ramage commented, "and there wasn't much sign of a fish for sale back there: the fishermen did not go out last night."

"Just as well, sir," Orsini commented. "We'd probably have run down some of those boats in the darkness!"

"I think I preferred marching to Pitigliano," Rossi muttered to himself. "This is like climbing up the side of a mountain."

"This is climbing up the side of a mountain," Orsini said, "but have you forgotten all those hills in Genova?"

"I thought I had, but this is bringing back the memory."

"Your arm - is it hurting?" Orsini asked.

"No, it's the muscles in my legs," Rossi grumbled. "It's never like this in the Calypso . . ."

Castello came into sight once again, but after they had marched another hundred yards along the track, winding over a ridge, it vanished as they dipped into a small valley. Now they could see the rocks and cliffs on the west side of the island, and the sea seemed a long way below them. Not as far down as Castello was up, Rossi pointed out in a complicated joke which relied more on a Genovese accent than a sense of humour.

When they reached the top of the next ridge, from which they could see the track entering Castello in the distance as though it was a fuse leading to a powder keg, Ramage called a halt because, to a casual onlooker, it was a logical place for a rest. For the column, as Ramage walked back to tell them, it was their chance to have a good look at what they faced at Castello, whether the hostages were on the island or not.

Aitken, after making sure that no French soldiers or contadini were watching, joined Ramage and sat down beside him.

"Supposing the hostages aren't up there, sir?" he asked. "What do we do?"

The eternal question. Ramage laughed and with his finger pushed a small twig in front of the black beetle which also seemed intent on going up to Castello. "I could hand you over to the garrison and make Kenton the first lieutenant! However, if the hostages aren't there, then we get angry with the garrison, blame the commandant of the fort at Santo Stefano for giving us wrong information, and hope the commandant here at Castello actually knows where they are. That way we'll save ourselves having to search any more. I don't particularly want to march up to every fort in the Tyrrhenian Sea. With the exception of Pianosa, which is very flat, the rest are very mountainous. Gorgona, Montecristo . . . more climbing."