An original stone stairway still ran down to the courtyard where an archway, missing its gates, opened onto the northern approach to the bridge. The store-room where the muskets had been found occupied the whole western side of the fort and was the only stone room left in San Miguel. It had an elegant curved ceiling and Sharpe guessed the room must have once been the main hall, or perhaps even a chapel. Then, after the rest of the fort's interior collapsed, someone had driven a door through the northern wall and used the store-room as a cattle byre. Now, for a time at least, the ruined fort had been restored to martial duty, though it had precious little value except as an observation post. The place would not last five minutes against a cannonade.

Sharpe stared at the moonlit fields across the river. There was a farm just two hundred yards down the road, a small place with a white-walled yard and a tower above the entrance gate. Good place for a battery of cannon, he thought, because the artillerymen could knock loopholes in the farmyard wall and so be safe from rifle fire, and the frogs would have the fort reduced to dust and rubble in less time than it would take to soft boil an egg, and then their infantry would come from the olive groves on the other side of the road, and how the hell would he defend San Miguel then? But there would be no attack, he told himself, and even if there were, the partisans in the Sierra de Gredos would send warning of the French approach and Sharpe would have a full day in which to summon reinforcements from Salamanca.

But that would not happen. He was only supposed to stay here one week, after which a Spanish garrison would arrive. One week for Tubbs to sort through the captured muskets, and that week should be uneventful. A rest.

"I don't know why they bother to send a full Commissary to do this work,»

Sharpe said, staring down into the courtyard where Tubbs's ox-wagon waited for the muskets.