He glared at her, rubbing granular sleep from the corners of his eyes, and grunted, "What the hell are you doing here?"
She didn't let him see her flinch. "Cooking breakfast." She stirred the eggs and crumbled in another pinch of dried bacon crisps. Tweedledum, the male, crept up within a meter of the fire, drooling. Cadmann shooshed him away and crawled up closer, shouldering Mary Ann gently aside. His bloodshot eyes narrowed with interest. He started to say something, then caught her smiling at him and turned it into a yawn, scratching himself crudely. Mary Ann caught an awesome whiff of morning breath.
Both of Cadmann's big hands went to his head. "God, that hurt."
"You earned it. You finished off the vodka last night."
"No," he croaked, genuine distress in his voice. His voice sounded as if something small and struggling were trapped in his larynx. Cadmann backed into his tent, and emerged holding his canteen. He waggled it in one hand, grinning through a week's worth of beard at the answering swish. "Hair of the dog."
He tossed it back, guzzling with short, choppy movements of his Adam's apple. Why do you do this to yourself? Doesn't matter. You'll have to stop now.
He tossed the canteen to the side to clank noisily against a pile of rocks. The dogs attacked him simultaneously from either side, yipping at him to play with them or feed them or any one of a hundred other doggy concerns.
Cadmann wrestled with them for a tolerant moment, then shoved both away and glared at them nastily. "If you don't shut the hell up, I am going to shoot you both. I am going to line you up and shoot you both with the same goddamn bullet. Do you understand me?"
They arfed and snapped playfully at each other's tails and ears.
Cadmann stretched, naked but for a baggy pair of shorts. His muscular arms were only fractionally better tanned than his chest. He's lost weight. The wounds, and then the drinking—
Mary Ann stopped stirring the eggs as the first curl of smoke wafted up from the pan.
"What in the hell is that mess?"
"Call it an Avalon omelet. It's our breakfast," she said.
He thrust a fork into the pan, probing, and snapped at her, "How much of it is poison?"
She took the fork and shoveled a bite into her own mouth, glaring right back.
"Half, eh? Well, I'm tough. I can handle that." He tried to sit in a gracefully cross-legged position, but finally just sort of collapsed into a heap. "My head."
"Your breath. Here. Eat."
Cadmann took the fork back and scraped half the contents of the pan onto a plate. The suspicion in his eyes faded after the first bite. "Damn, this isn't half—"
At the first sign of her smile he shut up and hunched over the pan, sulking as he ate.
Mary Ann poured reconstituted nonfat milk and sipped contentedly. It was startlingly clean, and aerated, filled with tiny, needlelike ice crystals from the snowmelt stream that ran near Cadmann's campsite. Drunk. Hurt. Mad. And he's still picked a better place than Zack ever did...
She squinted across the fire at Cadmann. Time? Yes, while the hangover lasts. "You can forget about me going back to the Colony. I'm staying. You can carry me down, but I'll just climb back. If you want to break both of my legs, that might stop me, but I wouldn't bet on it."
"You are going," he said. He ate the last forkful of the eggs, squinted at her and belched with satisfaction. "Right after lunch."
"Keep the head down." One of Cadmann's broad hands clamped onto the back of her neck as they crouched behind an outcropping of rock near the eastern edge of the mesa. "Damn hangfires—"
Brapp!! The sound was not as loud as Mary Ann expected, but she heard it as much with her body as her ears. The shaped engineering charge rent the mountainside. Rock chips and clots of dirt flew in all directions. A gout of dust and powdered earth mushroomed into the sky. Crouching next to her, Cadmann grinned. "Fun, eh?"
She bobbed her head nervously. "Finest kind."
His hands were gentle as he helped her to her feet. Shielding his eyes against the dust, he surveyed his handiwork.
The third detonation of the day completed a hole in the granite face twenty meters above the mesa. It looked very like the opening excavation of a mine. Shelf-like slabs of rock jutted out from the earth, their ends shattered by the concussion.
"I'm not sure I understand why you don't just build on the flat."
"Weren't you in the camp?" She heard the sarcasm change to something else. He stared at her. "Mary Ann—" His voice softened. "Yeah. Well, there are monsters here."
"I know that."
"So we—I—don't want to be on the flat. Also, I want the flatland for farming—if I decide to stay, all of the farmland will be worth its acreage in gold foil. Second, drainage—if I build underground on the hillside, rain and snowmelt will run right off, if I build my roof right. Third, view. From where we'll... I'll be, I'll have the best damn view that ever was. Right down on their heads. And fourth, I want us to be unreachable. One path, and it twists, and I'll guard it. I won't be on some tabletop watching one of those come at me at ninety miles an hour."
She saw it now, and her ears burned. My God, of course not! Why didn't I see... the way he looked at me? Oh. "It was a stupid question, wasn't it?"
"Uh—"
"Cadmann, I know. I can accept it. But—well, sometimes it hurts."
His hand moved to touch hers, then drew back. She held her breath. He turned away to survey his work, then turned back, a deeply satisfied smile creasing his face. "There are more reasons, but those will do for the moment." He looked at her sharply. "Nobody's asking you to live in it. Or to stay here."
"I'm staying." She stood on her tiptoes and locked her arms around his neck. "I love you, Cadmann. I lost too much coming to Avalon. I'm not losing you, too."
He reached back to unfasten her fingers from the back of his neck, but she clung too tightly, and finally he just met her eyes squarely.
"You do things my way," he said. "If you don't like it, go home. Down there, things can be whatever way people decide by vote that they should be. This is not a democracy. Up here I'm the bottom line."
"Male chauvinist," she said, kissing him lightly.
"I'm a ma chauvinist. I'd probably be the same way if I was a woman. I just want to get this straight before we... start anything."
"I love you," she repeated. The rock dust at the corner of her eyes was slightly muddied. "Love, honor and obey. Isn't that what women used to promise? I will, you know."
He gave her a hard, brief hug. "Then let's get started."
"Aye, aye, sir. What first?"
"Defenses. Notice anything about the—our—house site?"
"Many things."
"Boulder. That one."
"Big."
"And it will roll, once I dig it out. So I dig. Put chocks under it first. Levers on the chocks. Anyone wants to come up the path without permission—"
"Any one?"
"Or any thing. If it comes up and we don't like it, we roll the boulder down."
"I'm for that. What next?"
"Terrace down the hill. Vegetable garden. Divert some water from the
Amazon to keep the vegetables happy, and us too. Then finish the house. I have to finish the excavation by hand to make sure that I have the dimensions that I want. Then I level the floor and set the corner posts. That will take about three weeks."
She smiled uneasily. "Three weeks. Cadmann, how long are you planning to stay up here?"
It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it instantly. "Until I'm finished. Until I feel like going the hell back down. And the instant you don't like it up here, go."