The covenant - James A. Michener [186]
'She has lovely hair,' a Malay woman said, reaching out to fluff the girl's red tresses.
Adriaan, overcome with embarrassment, asked Seena, 'Is there somewhere . . .'
'Get away, you . . .' The girl uttered an oath equal to her mother's and chased the women back. 'We can sit here,' and she indicated an old wagon chest at the entrance to the hut in which she lived with a ramshackle collection of other children.
'Where's your father?' Adriaan asked.
'Out killing Bushmen,' she said.
'When will he be back?'
'Who knows? Last time it took him four weeks to clean out the valleys.'
'Can I stay here?'
'Was my mother right? Are you looking for a wife?'
'I'm . . . I'm . . . looking for your father.'
'You don't have to wait for him. He doesn't care what happens. Have you a farm?'
'I live a long way off.'
'Good.' That was all she said, but the single word conveyed her longing to get away from this tempestuous place.
It was worse when Rooi himself roared in from the manhunt. He was a huge man with a flaming head of red hair that gave him his name. He was really Rupertus van Valck, from a family which had settled early at the Cape. Rooi van Valck, Rooi the Falcon, the red-haired terror who submitted to no control, whether from the Cape governor, the Lords XVII, or God Himself.
The Van Valcks first had trouble with authority in the time of Van Riebeeck, when Leopold, the stubborn soldier who had founded the family, sought permission to marry a Malaccan girl. The Compagnie dillydallied so long that when permission was finally granted, Rooi's grandfather was a sire twice over. The next serious clash came when Mevrouw van Valck, a lively, independent-minded woman, wanted to dress in a way becoming her prettiness. From Amsterdam the Lords XVII specifically ordered that 'Mevrouw van Valck must not wear bombazine, and certainly not a bright yellow bombazine, and especially since she is not the wife of a senior Compagnie official.' When she persisted, with her husband's encouragement, soldiers were sent to rip the dress apart, whereupon Van Valck thumped the soldiersand spent a long day on the wooden horse.
Since he had not been dropped onto the killing horse from any height, he escaped the permanent injury that had marred Willem van Doorn's later life, but he never escaped the corroding resentment, and when some months later one of the soldiers who dropped him was found with his throat cut, it was assumed that Van Valck had done it. Nothing was proved, but subsequently, when Willem and Katje made their escape through the bitter almond, this Van Valck followed the same route. But he went north.
There, in a wild and spacious valley, he built his huts, assembled slaves and runaways, and launched the infamous Van Valcks. He had four sons, and they proliferated, but all kept to the initial valley, where they farmed vast herds of animals and planted whole orchards of a single fruit. They sheared their own sheep, wove their own cloth, and tanned their hides to make leather shoes. They timbered, built rude roads, and had a community which needed to move out for nothing except periodic journeys to graze, and into which officials were afraid to enter.
It was the other side of the African coin. At the Cape, citizens came to attention when the Lords XVII handed down a directive; they lived for the Compagnie's profit, from the Compagnie's largesse, and in obedience to the Compagnie's strict laws. But at Van Valck's frontier, the red-haired adventurers said, 'To hell with the Compagnie!' and enforced it.
No predikant had ever preached at Rooi van Valck's, or ever dared to castigate the master for having four wives. For two generations no Van Valck had been legally married, and in this generation none wished to be. The melange of children could not be distinguished, and their bounding health and good spirits belied the Compagnie's belief that children must be reared in strict accordance with the Bible. At Rooi's, there were no Bibles.
'So you come looking for a bride?' the