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.