Free Ramage's Challenge by Dudley Pope Page A

just behind the sandy beach, although the sea was often obscured by small woods of pines. Near the northernmost causeway the Fiume Albinia ran into the sea, close by a big square tower, Torre Saline. Just a wide-mouthed stream, in fact, which spent the summer dried up and in the winter prevented nearby fields from flooding. More important now, however, was the fact that it met the coast (and with Torre Saline would be as good as a signpost in the dark) only a hundred yards or so from the turning on the Via Aurelia for Marsiliana and Pitigliano.
    Ah, the nostalgia that a map created. Up to the north was Punta Ala; then Scarlino, Massa Marittima, Castelnuovo—all places on the road to Volterra. That was the wonderful thing about Italy—many of the place-names sounded like musical notes. And many of the derivations of the names were now hidden in the shadows cast by time. Did the silver in the name “Argentario” come from a Roman banker who once owned a villa there (
argentum
being Latin for silver) or from the thousands of olive trees growing on its slopes? The underside of an olive leaf was silvery; a breeze sweeping the olive groves turned the leaves so that, from a distance, all the grove—indeed the whole island—seemed coated in silver.
    Talamone, too, was an odd name unless you knew it was named after Telamon, the King of Salamis, who landed there after returning from the Argonaut expedition. The Calypsos, some of them anyway, would be landing tonight very close to where Telamon went on shore. Now Telamon’s monument here was a small, walled fishing port with a square tower rising up from the middle of it. And Santo Stefano had been a small but powerful place in medieval days, important enough for Philip II to build the Fortezza, which was named after him. And had not the Santo Stefanesi sent a dozen ships to fight the Saracens in the Battle of Lepanto?
    Port ‘Ercole, at the other end of Argentario, was the Port of Hercules of Roman times, and important enough for the Spaniards to build Forte della Stella (star-shaped and strongly built) and the Forte di Monte Filippo … both reminded him, once again, of sailing into Porto Ercole with the bomb ketches …
    Tuscany—what an area! One’s own memories (yesterday’s history) spilled over into ancient history: here Philip II had built forts, even before sailing the Armada against England, and Captain Ramage had attacked some of the forts two and a half centuries later. Tonight he would be landing where Telamon landed (in legend, anyway), after sailing with Jason and the other heroes to fetch the Golden Fleece; and once you went back to the Argonauts, Spain’s activities only two and a half centuries ago became stale news.
    Two and a half centuries hence (around 2050), would some young Royal Navy officer land there in the darkness? What would the map of the world (Europe, anyway) look like then?
    At this moment, Ramage mused, with Bonaparte holding everything from the Baltic to the Levant, it is hard to think of the Mediterranean as anything
but
a French lake—until you remember that it has, at various times, been a Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, and Saracen lake, not to mention the periods much later when the Spaniards and Austrians claimed it.
    For the moment, though, he reminded himself, it was enough to know that the turning to the left along the Via Aurelia which went to Pitigliano was just past the mouth of the Fiume Albinia. Within a few hundred yards was the massive square tower, Torre Saline. And a mile further along the coast was Orbetello, whose history started
before
the Etruscans…. So the Calypsos needed to find the Torre Saline.
    The sentry’s knock warned of Aitken coming down to report that the men on the list were waiting at the after end of the quarterdeck. “So you are taking Rennick, sir?”
    â€œYes, it’d look bad in the despatch if I left him