Sorceress of Darshiva

bow—nails, a barrel of tar, and even a fairly good saw. We'll have it afloat before morning."
    "I'm glad you approve," Silk said sourly. He made a wry face. "This is unnatural," he complained.
    "What's the problem, Kheldar?" Velvet asked him.
    "Usually, when I want a boat, I steal one. Using one of my own seems immoral somehow."
    She laughed gaily and patted his cheek. "Poor, poor dear," she said. "It must be terrible to be burdened with so delicate a conscience."
    "All right, ladies," Polgara said then, "let's see to supper."
    While Durnik, Toth, and Eriond worked on the patch and Polgara, Ce'Nedra, and Velvet prepared supper, Garion and the others fetched more lumber and began to fashion crude oars. They continued to work, even as they ate. Somehow, everything seemed right to Garion. All his friends were around him and they were all busy. Although the repairing of the boat was of vital importance, the simple chores involved seemed almost mundane, and Garion could lose himself in the tasks at hand with no sense of the urgency which had attended the things he had been forced to do lately. It was almost soothing.
    After the ladies had finished with supper, they carried canvas buckets of water from the river and heated the water with hot rocks. Then they retired behind a screen of tenting to bathe.
    About midnight, Garion went down to the water's edge to dip his sore hands into the river. Ce'Nedra sat not far away, idly letting handfuls of sand trickle out from between her fingers. "Why don't you see if you can get some sleep, Ce'Nedra?" Garion asked her.
    "I can stay awake as long as you can," she replied.
    "I'm sure you can, but why?"
    "Don't patronize me, Garion. I'm not a child."
    "You know," he said slyly, "I've noticed that myself on any number of occasions."
    "Garion!" she gasped, and then she suddenly blushed.
    He laughed, rose to his feet, and went over and kissed her soundly. "Go get some sleep, dear," he told her.
    "What are you doing over there?" she asked, looking up the beach to where the others still worked.
    "We're making oars. If we just push that barge out into the river, the current's going to take us all the way down into Gandahar. ‘'
    "Oh. All right then. Have a pleasant night." She stretched and yawned. "Why don't you get me a blanket before you go back to building oars?"
    It took Durnik and Toth most of the night to nail a rough, tar-smeared patch over the hole in the bow, while the others fashioned crude oars fixed on long poles. Several hours before daylight, fog began to rise in misty tendrils from the surface of the river. After Durnik had liberally applied hot tar to the inside and the outside of the patch, he stepped back and critically examined his handiwork.
    "I think it's going to leak," Silk predicted.
    "All boats leak." Durnik shrugged. "We can bail the water out."
    It took a great deal of effort and some fairly exotic rigging to get the barge back into the river again. Durnik leaped aboard and went forward with a torch to examine the patch. "A little trickle is all," he said with some satisfaction. "It's nothing we can't keep ahead of."
    The fog grew steadily thicker as they loaded their packs aboard the barge. It was spring in this part of the world, and frogs sang lustily of love in the rushes at the river's edge just upstream. It was a pleasant, drowsy sound. Durnik scouted several hundred yards downstream and found a shallow bank where the current had cut away the soil. He fashioned a ramp from the remaining lumber. They towed the barge down to the cut bank and loaded the horses on board.
    "Let's wait until we have a little more light," the smith suggested. "Fog's bad enough, but when you add darkness to it, it's almost impossible to see where you're going. Rowing this thing isn't going to be so enjoyable that we need to paddle around in circles just for the entertainment of it."
    "Couldn't we rig a sail of some sort?" Silk asked hopefully.
    "Easily," Durnik replied. He wet one finger with his tongue and held it up. "I'll do that just as soon as you work out a way to make the wind blow.''
    Silk's face fell.
    "While you're doing that, I need to go talk with Ce'Nedra." He went back up the beach and gently shook Garion's sleeping wife awake.
    "You know? Sometimes he has a very warped sense of humor," Silk observed.
    When the first light of day began to tinge the misty eastern horizon, they pushed out into the fog and took their places at the oars. "I don't want to seem critical,