Lars and the travelers had a long talk with the Englishmen while Nanette and Sukki bandaged as much as they could.  Only one could not walk, and might never walk again, but he could sit on a horse.  They got their own horses.  Most of the rest of the horses were used to carry the dead.  It seemed the English wanted to expand their farms and spread out in the fertile land of what would one day be called the Garden State.  They wanted the land for their children and grandchildren.  They imagined killing the natives was the quick and easy way to that end.  The Lenape had not been allowed to trade for guns, so the English retained that technological advantage.  The Susquehannock, however, had been supplied guns by the French fur traders and they overran the Lenape in the sixteen thirties.  By the sixteen-fifties, the Lenape were tributary to the Susquehannock, and later the Iroquois of the Five Nations took over.  It was all about the beaver trade.

By the time Lars was born in 1690, and certainly by the time he turned ten, when his parents were killed, the Susquehannock and Iroquois control of the Lenape had eased, but now a new master had come to the Delaware delta area.  Lars got adopted into a Lenape tribe, while the English in Philadelphia kept pressuring both the Lenape and the Susquehannock for more land.  When Carteret and Berkley allowed a land swap, and so many quakers and other nonconformists moved out of central New Jersey and headed for new homes in Pennsylvania, the pressure became acute. Some Lenape, who eventually came to be called Delaware, already moved to the upper Ohio valley.

“The English will be back,” Lars said, as they watched the English ride away.  “They will not quit pressing for the land regardless of what they promise.”

“A cynical view.”  The old man who stood beside Lars, the one Lars called Uncle Buck made his assessment.

Lars shrugged.  “Even if we use the Delaware River as a boundary, and the ones out of New York become satisfied for the time being, the ones pushing up from Philadelphia have no such convenient line.  The Lehigh River will not hold them.  I’m afraid the land east of the Appalachian Mountains is lost to us.”

“Cynical and defeatist,” Uncle Busk said.

Lars did not argue. He took Uncle Buck, Lockhart, Morharala, Decker, Tony, Lincoln, another Lenape chief, and Louis, and they all sat around a fire smoking a pipe and talking peace.  Commander Takar observed.  He tended to stay away from the fire being essentially made of wood.  Elder Stow and the women set the camp, and Louis got to sleep one more time in that miraculous tent.

In the morning, Lars removed all distinguishing marks and equipment from the two horses he saved from the Englishmen.  Spoils of war, he called them, along with all the English guns and powder.  He gave one horse to Louis with thanks for guiding the travelers safely to him.

“I think your friends are true people of power and could likely go wherever they want, with or without my help,” Louis admitted.

Lars and the travelers said thank you all the same, and Louis rode back north happy and with his prize.

The other horse went to Uncle Buck.  The travelers discovered that Uncle Buck was a member of the Susquehannock people, an Iroquois speaking people like the Mohawk, not Algonquin speakers like the Lenape people.  Of course, it did not matter to the travelers what language anyone spoke since they heard everything in English.

“I am setting small hamlets, like observation posts all along the Delaware from the Lehigh River all the way up to where the east and west branches of the Delaware join to make the river,” Lars told the travelers.  “Those are the lines we hope to hold.  The Lehigh against the Philadelphians and the Delaware against the New Yorkers.  How long it will hold, I cannot say.  We have become so few, we might not be able to hold anything, even with Susquehannock help.”

After breakfast, everyone crossed the river to the Pennsylvania side and waved good-bye to Louis. They waited there, and an hour later, a massive spaceship landed in an open meadow.  Commander Takar promised there would be no more incidents.  Lars knew that was not true.  Takar was not the captain of the ship, and the captain would insist on a survey of the planet before they left.  Most of that would happen from the edge of space, but they would set down once again, briefly in the Gobi Desert. At least they would take great pains to land where no people cold watch them, a protocol that almost all subsequent visitors to the earth would follow.  The Reichgo were already warned about being seen.

When the prison ship set down, a whole family of sanguar escaped into the desert.  The sanguar had tunneled through the metal walls to right near a door, which when opened, allowed the sanguar to escape into the sand.  The Ahluzarian police eventually found and plugged the hidden hole they escaped from, but that happened after they were back in space and half-way to their destination.  The captain refused to turn around and do the right thing.

Fortunately, for the human race, the sanguar died out after two or three hundred years, and never expanded beyond the desert lands.  Whether they died out from too much atmosphere, too cold winters, or too much inbreeding was hard to say, but during those two to three hundred years, they terrorized certain places in the Gobi—places that the human population learned to avoid.  Apparently, when Elder Stow mentioned the Gobi Desert as a likely environment, he was speaking from knowledge he gleaned from his own database.  He just did not spell it out.

After the Ahluzarians were on their way. Lars said good-bye to the travelers.  “Maybe in my next life it will be better to stick around and relax for a week or so.  Right now, I have too much to do, though I thank you for taking care of Doctor Miller.  I suspected him, but I had no proof.  Sadly, his vials of diseases have hardly been needed, or maybe he spread a bunch among the native population before you stopped him from spreading more.”  Lars looked sad and shrugged.  “Anyway, Uncle Buck will guide you safely through native land to the next time gate.  I expect you to keep him safe if you go through Philadelphia.  My wife is down around where Wilmington will be located, not far from the original Fort Christina.  If you get that far, give her my love and tell her I am fine.”

Uncle Buck proved to be a quiet man.  He said very little, but he also missed very little, observing everything.  He rode up front with Lockhart and Katie, and for a week, Lincoln had to keep his mouth shut as he dared not talk about the future.  Finally on the last night before the time gate, Uncle Buck said good-bye and rode back to the small village that grew up around Lars’ home.

The next morning, when they headed toward the time gate, Lockhart finally had to ask. “What?”  Everyone noticed Lincoln’s impatience through those days.

“Lars’ wife is killed and the whole village burnt down only a few years from now,” he said.

“What?  She seemed such a nice girl,” Nanette said from behind.

Lincoln nodded.  “Apparently, when the French and Indian war starts, most Lenape fight with the French.”

“Most?” Katie asked.

“The ones who already moved into the Ohio valley and have to deal with the French traders and some French villages take the English side.”

“What about Lars?”

“Believe it or not, he ends up helping the Virginia militia.  I guess the Lenape and Virginians were far enough apart, so they did not bother each other.  He guides a twenty-two-year-old Major George Washington to an early victory.  Of course, the general over Washington is a moron and loses the main battle, but Washington gets a good reputation for the future.”

“Interesting,” Tony said as he rode beside Nanette in the rear, Ghost trailing out behind.  He saw Sukki coming back to the front and guessed they were near the time gate.  “What I want to know right now is where we are going.  Who is next?”

Lincoln did not even need to look in the database.  “Michelle Marie,” he said. “She is French.  We might end up in France, or in this general area depending on when we arrive,”

“You never know,” Lockhart said as Sukki reigned to a halt and Decker and Elder Stow came in to join the group as they prepared to go through the time gate.

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MONDAY

Revolution episode 9.7 The travelers join a military group headed toward General Washington and Valley Forge and they figure out that the Kairos Michelle Marie is probably there. Until Monday, Happy Reading

 

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