"It will be close enough," Anheg concluded. He turned back to Barak. "Tell Greldik that we'll start the portage tomorrow morning - before the sailors have time to sober up."

Ce'Nedra had not fully understood the meaning of the word "portage" until she arrived the following morning at the riverbank to find the sweating Chereks hauling their ships out of the water and manhandling them along by main strength on wooden rollers. She was appalled at the amount of effort required to move a ship even a few inches.

She was not alone in that. Durnik the smith took one shocked look at the procedure and immediately went looking for King Anheg. "Excuse me, your Honor," he said respectfully, "but isn't this bad for the boats -as well as the men?"

"Ships," Anheg corrected. "They're called ships. A boat is something else."

"Whatever you call them - won't banging them along over those logs spring their seams?"

Anheg shrugged. "They all leak quite a bit anyway," he replied. "And it's always been done this way."

Durnik quickly saw the futility of trying to talk to the King of Cherek. He went instead to Barak, who was rather glumly considering the huge ship his crew had rowed upriver to meet him. "She looks very impressive when she's afloat," the big red-bearded man was saying to his friend, Captain Greldik, "but I think she'll be even more impressive when we have to pick her up and carry her."

"You're the one who wanted the biggest warship afloat," Greldik reminded him with a broad smirk. "You'll have to buy enough ale to float that whale of yours before your crew's drunk enough to try to portage her - not to mention the fact that it's customary for a captain to join in when the time comes to portage."

"Stupid custom," Barak growled sourly.

"I'd say that you're in for a bad week, Barak." Greldik's grin grew broader.

Durnik took the two seamen aside and began talking earnestly with them, drawing diagrams on the sandy riverbank with a stick. The more he talked, the more interested they became.

What emerged from their discussions a day later were a pair of lowslung cradles with a dozen wheels on each side. As the rest of the Chereks jeered, the two ships were carefully slid out of the water onto the cradles and firmly lashed in place. The jeering faded noticeably, however, when the crews of the two ships began trundling their craft across the plain. Hettar, who happened to ride by, watched for a few moments with a puzzled frown. "Why are you pulling them by hand," he asked, "when you're in the middle of the largest herd of horses in the world?"

Barak's eyes went very wide, and then an almost reverent grin dawned on his face.