Instead he stared down at the river, counting the bridge’s pontoons that were dark shadows in the mist that writhed just above the water. He decided he would count them and not look at Fort Joseph until the first shot was fired. Thirty-one, he reckoned, which meant there was one pontoon every ten feet, for the river was just over a hundred yards wide. The pontoons were big, clumsy, square-ended barges across which a timber roadway had been laid. The winter had been wet all across southern Spain and Portugal; the Guadiana was running high and he could see the water seething where it broke on the pontoons’ bluff bows. Each boat had anchor chains running into the river and spring lines tensioned between the neighboring barges across which the heavy baulks ran to support the chesses, the planks that made the roadway. It probably weighed over a hundred tons, Sharpe reckoned, and this job would not be over until that long bridge was destroyed.

“They’re dozy bastards,” Harper said in wonderment, presumably speaking of Fort Joseph’s defenders, but still Sharpe would not look. He was staring at Fort Josephine across the river where he could see men clustered about a cannon. They stepped away and the gun fired, belching a dirty smoke above the river’s thinning mist. It had fired a round of canister. The tin can, crammed with bullets, tore itself apart as it left the cannon’s muzzle and the half-inch balls whipped the air about Sharpe’s hilltop. The boom of the cannon rolled and echoed up the river valley. “Anyone hit?” Sharpe called. No one answered.

The cannon’s fire only made the defenders of the nearer fort stare at the hill more intently. They were aiming one of their own cannon now, trying to elevate it so that the canister would scrape the skyline. “Keep your heads down,” Sharpe said. Then there was a dull rattle of musketry and he dared to look back at the attack.

It was almost over. There were redcoats in the ditch, more on ladders, and even as Sharpe watched he saw the redcoats surge over the parapet and carry bayonets at the blue-uniformed Frenchmen.