Massachusetts Bay, December 1629
Cadan Moon’s path had never been so clear: Kill the man; steal the horse. Sometimes, solutions were as hard to fathom as they were to follow. Other times, like today, truth cawed out like a murder of crows in the tree: Kill Ben Pratt; steal his horse. Cadan was committed to both, and more.
The young man blended into the rain-soaked woods hemming the Aptuxet Trail, which ran from Plymouth Plantation twenty miles south to the Separatists’ trading house near Buzzard’s Bay. He kept the trumpet-barreled blunderbuss he’d scavenged from Maremount dry inside the bearskin cloak Master Thomas had given him. He’d loaded the brass flintlock with a quarter pound of oversized, lead swan shot, hoping the pattern of its single shot would be wide enough to drop two men at once if need be, at least at close range. The drizzle increased and a single bead of water dripped onto his brow and slid down the side of the raised letter “T” branded into the flesh of his forehead. Even the elements mocked his shame-faced existence. But not for long.
The Dutchman who’d sailed past the abandoned plantation at Maremount two days before and bought up Cadan’s last beaver pelts had agreed to wait at the trading house until the following dawn. If Cadan made it, the captain promised to spirit him away, first to Fort Amsterdam on Manahata, then down the smuggling route to the islands—all in exchange for a horse. “I’ll be waiting in the ordinary, taking ales with the crew until late,” the Dutchman had said. “We leave on the morning tide. Bring us one of the governor’s fine new horses and you can join us.” Since Cadan knew who’d be riding that horse, it had been an easy promise.
As the second hour came and went, he kept watch to the north and sharpened his grievances to keep his blood hot for the coming fight:
“Dead parents made me an orphan,” Cadan cursed, “My dead wife made me widower. But I’m one thing more, a thing with no English name: a father without a child. What’s the word for that, Pratt?” He wondered if his wife Sarah had known a word for it in her language, but he hadn’t known her long enough or had reason to ask. He swore to ask Pratt before he killed him.
“What am I, Ben?” he practiced, imagining his rapier pressed into the small of Pratt’s throat. “All that time with Master Morton, surely he taught you the word for a childless father?” If any man were sure to know a term, whether in English or Latin, it had been Thomas Morton.
Thunder rolled over the bay. Cadan nestled deeper into his bearskin robe and waited.
Maremount Plantation, 1627
“We’ll have no more of you dressed in blue, Cadan,” Master Morton said. “You’re no man’s servant and you mustn’t present as one! We are ‘consociates,’ you and I! Equals! And we shall dress like equals!”
“Yes, Master Mor—I mean, yes, Thomas,” the teenaged Cadan replied, carrying the muskets and powder behind Morton and his dogs. In his mid-forties, Thomas Morton dressed in finery even in the wilderness. He was tall, with wild, long hair under his floppy Cavalier’s hat, and he trimmed his beard as pointed as the Devil’s. He appeared at first glance to have sprung from the same mold as the aristocratic dandies whom the Separatists (as Morton insisted on calling the Plymouth settlers) had driven away when they set up a competing plantation to barter with the Natives. But Morton was of a different cloth: a hunter who never missed a shot, a noble who’d once had a bounty on his head, and a merchant with the rare gift of seeing straight into the soul of whomever he traded with.
“See there?” Morton said, taking Cadan by the shoulder and turning him to the south. Two distant figures quickly leapt behind a tree. “They’re watching us.”
“Who?”
“The Plymouth church-mice. They’re trying to catch us selling guns to the savages.”
“But we do sell them guns.”
“Yes. Happily,” Morton said, casually lifting a musket from Cadan’s arms. “And if Plymouth gives me the chance, I’ll sell the savages enough guns to drive those corn-rustling, king-hating Separatists into the sea before their filthy spawn slicks every rock along this coast.” Morton rubbed the flintlock-mechanism’s frizzen clean with his glove, then drew back the hammer holding the flint Cadan had retouched that morning. “You see, Cadan,” Morton said, sighting the barrel in the direction of the interlopers, “the Separatists arrived here bearing only the Word of God for trade, but His Word counts for little to men with beaver pelts to sell. Heathen or Christian, all men prefer muskets.” Morton spun suddenly and fired into the nearest thicket. A stag bounded out, ran twenty steps, and fell dead.
“I didn’t even see it!” Cadan exclaimed.
“Learn to see, son,” Morton said, handing him back the musket before drawing his skinning knife. Morton might call his indentured men “consociates” and make a show of pretending they were equals, but he only performed such tasks as he enjoyed. Skinning was one of them.
On the walk back to Morton’s “Maremount” stockade with the stag draped over Cadan’s shoulders, they’d spied a bear flipping rocks in a tidepool in search of lobsters. Morton shot it and gave Cadan the pelt.
Aptuxet Trail, December 1629
“Morton was always the best of men,” Cadan affirmed in the shadows, tightening the fur around his neck. “And Ben Pratt ever the worst.”
Plymouth, England, 1624
Cadan Moon and Ben Pratt sailed together from England in 1624, but it wasn’t their first encounter. All told, their ship’s company comprised of Thomas Morton; his partner, Captain Wollaston; Wollaston’s crew; and thirty boys and teens, each owing seven years labor for the privilege of being plucked from the grime of England’s cities and dropped into the howling void of Massachusetts. Cadan’s parents had died when the plague swept Devon. On the streets of (Old) Plymouth, he’d fallen in with a gang of children who stole to live. Three years older than Cadan, Ben Pratt had been a leader. He’d beaten Cadan, tried to bugger him, and stolen as much food as he could get away with while still extracting Cadan’s loyalty to the group.
Then it ended.
Cadan never knew for sure if Pratt had tripped him as they ran from the mob, but it didn’t matter: either way, they’d left him behind. The drunken merchants grabbed the slender teen and decided to make an example of him, dragging him back to their warehouse where they kicked his ribs until they broke and then held him down while they seared a “T” between his eyes with a home-made brand. Cadan keened for his dead mother when the warehouse owner plucked the hot iron cross from the hearth.
“I’ll teach you boys to rob me,” he’d smiled, opening his lips on two rows of sugar-blackened teeth and lowering the brand to Cadan’s brow. Mercifully, he’d fainted. He awoke with the echo of his own scream in his ears, lying in the rain on a garbage pile by the wharf; his swollen, bloody forehead forevermore proclaiming his guilt.
Six months later, on the night before leaving Plymouth, Cadan burned down the warehouse with the owner inside. The next day at sea, he saw Ben Pratt for the first time since the gang had abandoned him.
“Hello, C.,” Pratt mocked, “Or is your name ‘T’ now?” But Cadan had changed since the open-faced boy he’d been disappeared behind the brand on his forehead. When he answered, he pushed his dowel with the nail lashed to the end against Pratt’s belly hard enough to puncture his shirt, “My name’s still Cadan Moon. Best you remember it.”
With little to do onboard, Master Morton and Captain Wollaston drilled the boys on deck each day in fencing for their own amusement and against being boarded by pirates (a topic Wollaston seemed suspiciously well-informed about). An expert observer of human nature, Morton discerned well enough never to pair Ben and Cadan against each other, lest he lose his investment in whichever of them gutted the other. When they landed north of Plymouth on Massachusetts Bay to found Maremount Plantation, Morton believed his gang of street urchins ready to challenge the Separatists head-to-head for control of the fur trade.
Aptuxet Trail, December 1629
Nary a shadow had crossed the trail in the hours he’d waited. The rain began to freeze, and Cadan had to resist the urge to check his blunderbuss’s load. “If you loaded it right, it’ll stay right. If you didn’t, you can’t fix it in the rain,” he told himself. But if Ben Pratt didn’t come soon…
“If Pratt don’t come, you go back to Plymouth and kill him,” Cadan muttered. “Let ‘em hang you if they must, but it ends today.” He raised a hand and gently touched the edge of what remained of his right ear where they’d sliced it away, and he vowed to pay Pratt back in full for all he owed. Both to him and to Thomas Morton.
Maremount Plantation, March 1629
After an argument between Morton and Wollaston, Morton spent several days pacing and sulking. Then he sent Cadan, Ben Pratt, and a group of other favorites north to trade with the Natives and the European fishermen who worked the fifty-year-old cod-fishing station on Damairscove Island. When they returned, the boys found Morton alone, too drunk to stand, surrounded by a pile of broken crockery and firing pistols randomly into the air. Captain Wollaston, his ship, crew, and the other twenty-two indentured men were gone.
“Gone to Virginia to toil for tobacco! Gone like Joseph, sold by his treacherous brothers!” Morton wailed, then fired another shot. He might be too drunk to walk, but Morton would never be too drunk to shoot and reload. They left him alone until he sobered. Morton and Wollaston had shared a room and a bed—for warmth, surely, as did they all, Cadan assumed—but the men knew enough not to interrupt his grief, let alone comment on it. While they waited for Morton to regain himself, Ben Pratt tied together as many pelts as he could carry and defected to Plymouth with the booty.
Separatists prowled the woods. Spirits sank. Morton declared it was time for a party.
Maypole at Maremount, April 1629
The white pine they felled stood eighty-feet high, a child among its elders, but higher than any Maypole raised for centuries in England. The men set themselves and the oxen in harness and dragged it back to Maremount. After they’d dug a hole to support it, Morton put down the bottle that seemed to have grafted to his hand since Wollaston’s departure and nailed a huge rack of antlers to the top of the pole.
“That should frighten the moles of Plymouth back underground!” he laughed. “Tug away, boys! Get it up!” The men heaved in unison, the butt-end of the pine dropped into the hole, and the ribbon-draped phallus with its crest of horns rose on the heights above the sea, visible for miles to all, including the “moles.”
In the morning on April 30, boatloads of fishermen from Damairscove and Mohegan islands showed up with a hurdy-gurdy player, followed by dozens of Morton’s best Native customers. The latter brandished the muskets and pistols Morton had sold them since arriving, and they brought along three women—captives from a hostile tribe further inland. One of the women’s noses was cut away, a distinction that made her stand out in Cadan’s eye. He believed her scars those of a kindred soul, though he blushed when she stared back at him.
That afternoon, Ben Pratt and two others strutted into the stockage. They came armed, clad with helmets and breastplates. Pratt carried a Sergeant’s halberd and a message from the Plymouth governor to desist.
“This won’t be tolerated, Thomas,” Pratt harangued. “Selling guns to the savages and whoring is bad enough. Now you raise the Devil’s shaft?” He gesticulated at the Maypole, making a show of not daring to look at it, working himself into a lather like a Separatist preacher on Sunday morning.
“Bravo, Benjamin,” Morton said, mock clapping. “A fine performance for your seconds, but I know who you are, ‘some busy and insinuating rogue; some cogging, cozening slave’ out to gain some office… as I see you’ve done.” As the half-drunk Morton staggered up to him, Pratt put a hand on his rapier, as if to draw it. Morton clapped a hand over Pratt’s, holding it down, and leaned forward to coo delicately into his ear. “You wouldn’t be making a challenge of honor, would you, Ben? Just you and me, together at last?” Pratt’s companions moved to help, but the fifty men around them quickly formed a circle of unity, and Pratt’s men kept their hands off their weapons.
“How about it, Ben? You and me, blade to blade and cheek to cheek?” Morton asked, blowing a kiss in drunken jest, though every man knew Morton was sober enough to run Pratt through—armor be damned—before the other cleared the scabbard.
The trembling Pratt could only stammer, “I’m just the messenger, Master Morton. Plymouth ‘requests’ that you consider the effects of this pagan ritual on the savages, and on trade.”
Morton turned his back on Pratt in contempt and walked off with a dismissive backwards wave, “Bye-bye, Benny. Don’t come again or you’ll pay for the pelts you stole with your own.”
***
Englishmen, Basques, and Natives alike drank, sang, and danced around the Maypole all the next day, and Maremount’s stock of brew showed no signs of depleting. Morton looked on benevolently, interrupting only occasionally to recite poetry, mostly his own, which few of the others understood but all appreciated. It wasn’t every day the lord of the manor deigned to dance with fishermen and trappers, except perhaps back in Merry Devonshire. By the light of the evening bonfire, Cadan saw Morton approaching him with the first smile on his face since Wollaston’s flight.
“What’s her name, Cadan?” Morton asked, putting his arm around him.
“Sir?” Cadan pretended ignorance.
“The girl, son,” Morton belched and pointed through the flickering light toward the scar-nosed woman sitting against the stockage’s outer wall where her owner haggled with a fisherman over her rates. “You’ve had eyes on her since she turned up. Shall I buy her for you?”
“No, sir! I mean… Thomas, this isn’t right. Women sold as… It’s not Christian.”
Morton let out a belly laugh so loud the hurdy-gurdy player briefly paused, and the men reeling arm-in-arm around fire and pole staggered a step before the music resumed. “Oh, Cadan, I did forget—we’re in the ‘City on the Hill,’ God’s fortress in the wilderness! But—as with Plymouth—we are too full of religion and too lacking in humanity! You haven’t turned Separatist on me, have you, boy?”
“No! But I….” Cadan paused, then finally took Morton at his word to act his equal and looked him in the eye. “I’ve been a slave most my life, and I’d not wish it on anyone.” Morton sucked deeply on his long-stemmed pipe and gazed back at his protégé. The fire in the clay bowl lit his face, looking to Cadan like he truly was staring down the Devil.
“Fair enough,” Morton said. He laid his hand again on Cadan’s shoulder and spoke in a tender voice, “You think you’ll never love me, Cadan, but you will. And I’ll show you why—” Then Morton danced over to the barrel-chested pimp and bought “Sarah” for Cadan—permanently—for a price he never divulged.
The world-scarred pair, Cadan and Sarah, never learned much of each other’s language, but had learned enough about life to coax and return to each other over that short summer the first tenderness either of them had ever known.
Aptuxet Trail, December 1629
A flash of black burst round the bend in the trail. Cadan sucked a breath, ready to fight, but the two wolves trotted past without stopping, apparently not detecting him in the rain. He guessed they were a mated pair, and for that he envied them more than the dead.
Maremount, September 1629
A gunshot rang through the dawn, followed by cursing.
“Get away, Captain Shrimp! Off with you and your vermin!”
Cadan and Sarah had been sleeping in a tent behind the main house at Maremount Plantation when the gun went off. Morton had been inside the house, sleeping off his drunk as he’d done more often as the summer passed and business fell away for lack of men to pursue it. The majority of his remaining servants were trading just then along the Maine coast. Only one other man was inside the stockade—and he’d opened the gates for Plymouth’s militia commander, Myles Standish, when he came calling that morning with a dozen raiders. Now the turncoat stood beside the Separatists, revealing himself as their agent. Ben Pratt stood among the militiamen as well.
Cadan pantomimed to his pregnant wife to stay silent, then grabbed a hatchet and rushed around the edge of the main house to find Morton with a smoking pistol in one hand and a sword in the other staring down Captain Standish and his gang. Two men grabbed Cadan before he could attack. Then Pratt stepped forward and slammed the butt of his musket into Cadan’s gut, dropping him to his knees.
“His whore will be in the tent,” Pratt said, leading another man toward the back. Vomiting into the dirt, Cadan couldn’t rise to protest.
“Captain Shrimp!” Morton shouted, laughing in Standish’s face. “Have you come to add piracy to your history of murder?” Morton stood nearly a foot taller than Standish, a man whose temper was famously even shorter than his height, but Standish took it with a smile.
“It’s over, Morton. You’ll sell no more guns to be used against us.” Standish stepped forward and batted Morton’s sword aside with him own as two others circled and grabbed the Master of Maremount from behind. Standish then unfolded a sheet of paper and began reading innumerable charges leveled against Morton by the governor of Plymouth, including: selling guns to the savages, “unfair trade,” and worshipping the Devil on May Day. Struggling to lift his head from his knees, Cadan knew Standish spoke the truth: Maremount was finished. Plymouth had eliminated another competitor for the precious furs.
Plymouth, September 1629
Standish sought to hang Morton on the spot, but the other gentleman in the group prevented it—Morton still had allies enough in England to secure his safety. Not so for Morton’s “consociates.” Morton, Cadan, and Sarah were bound, gagged, and half-dragged to the shore, then rowed back to Plymouth. Once there, Sarah was separated from the men, while Cadan and Morton were locked together in a windowless warehouse. Whenever the Plymouth authorities got tired of Morton’s saucy replies to their interrogation, they dragged Cadan outside for another round of lashings. As for Cadan, they never asked him any questions at all.
After a particularly bad whipping administered by Pratt himself, Cadan awoke lying on the floor of their jail with Morton rubbing salve into his wounds.
“Steady, son,” Morton said gently. His tone was flat and defeated, but still held affection. “We don’t want these stripes to scar, do we?”
“No, sir.”
Morton didn’t bother to correct him for calling him “sir.” “That’s a good lad,” he said. “Do you know how special you are, Mr. Cadan Moon? Even the elephants adore you.”
“Sir? Elephants?” Cadan asked. He tried to roll over, but Morton stopped him. He explained what elephants were and how they generally looked.
“We have it on authority of Pliny the Elder. By his account, the elephants in Libya come out once a month to worship the moon. So, you see, even the beasts of the field look up to you. You’re very special, Cadan. Never forget it, my boy.”
“I won’t, sir.” Cadan had no idea what Morton was on about, but the salve soothed his pain and he soon fell asleep. When he awoke, he was told Morton had been freed on the condition he return to England. The Separatists had rowed him to an island up the coast to catch whatever ship he could. On condition of Morton’s leaving, Cadan’s life would be spared. Sarah had been bonded to work in the newly wealthy Pratt household, but when the militiamen came to take Cadan to the town square, they told him she’d gone into early labor from the shock of her treatment and died along with her child.
Aptuxet Trail, December 1629
“What am I, Ben? What’s the word for me now?” Cadan growled in his mind, stomping his feet inside his thin leather shoes against the cold. “A father with no child? Tell me, Pratt! Who am I?”
Plymouth, September 1629
All of Plymouth gathered for the show. Circling the Maypole might be denounced as the Devil’s dance in their eyes, but Cadan saw the demonic glee in every face as they dragged him into the square and locked his hands into the pillory, a block of wood with arm holes in it raised on a stake to shoulder height: the pillory was Plymouth’s Maypole. They’d shorn his head with a dull knife, leaving nicks and cuts over his scalp, his branding scar showing bold as dog’s balls. Someone shoved his head sideways and then nailed his right ear to the wood.
“Morton spared your life, but not your pain,” Pratt’s voice giggled in his other ear above the cheers of the crowd. “Pity about Sarah. She’d have fetched me a good price in Bermuda.” Cadan lashed out with his foot and heard Pratt curse as he stumbled off the pedestal and into the mud. Seconds later, a knife slashed Cadan’s ear off, briefly freeing his head before Pratt and another man twisted it again and nailed his left ear to the block.
Aptuxet Trail, December 1629
Cadan bestirred himself at the sound and listened. He heard the voice again—two voices—and rolled his aching shoulders to loosen them for the game to come. He’d expected the men to use the ride-and-tie system—one man riding ahead a distance, then tying the horse and continuing on foot, giving the horse a chance to rest while the second man caught up to it, and then him riding past the first man, and thus repeating the cycle until reaching their destination. It was the standard way of travel in Plymouth since there were barely thirty horses around the whole bay. Hearing two voices, his heart lurched—had they left the horse behind?
“No! It must be loaded with goods,” he thought. “All the better.” He twisted his neck with a satisfying crack and locked his eyes on the curve in the trail, awaiting Ben Pratt for the last time.
Plymouth Plantation, September 1629
“Reckon that’ll do,” said the leader of the men sent to free him.
It was midnight of the third day after Cadan had been nailed by the ear to the pillory, and the muddy square was deserted. He’d tried to be still, but eventually he’d torn the nail clean through the second ear he’d been pinned by. No longer held in place, he’d succumbed to the late-summer sun and collapsed, hanging from his arms still locked into the holes. When the man raised the pillory’s lid to free him, he’d fallen insensate in the mud.
“Lift him up, boys,” someone said. They carried him a mile out of Plymouth and dropped him on the path leading to Maremount. “Show your Devil-dancing, heathen face in Plymouth again and you’ll be hanged, Moon,” the voice said. Then they left him.
Cadan stumbled through dark back to Maremount only to find it robbed. The Separatists had stripped it of beaver pelts, weapons, livestock, coins and wampampeak—the shells traded as money amongst the Natives. He did find his bearskin. A few days later, his fellow servants returned from their northern trading mission. They talked of fighting, but it was clear the wind had blown down Morton’s Maypole for good, along with all talk of “consociates” and a confederacy of equals. After learning Morton had hitched a ride on a cod boat back to England, one by one the men drifted away.
One man begged forgiveness and sold himself into servitude for ten years in Plymouth in exchange for food and shelter—again in the newly wealthy Ben Pratt’s household. It’s how the man had known Pratt would be riding the Aptuxet Trail to parley with the Dutchman.
“Give him a twist of the knife for me, Cadan,” the man said when he snuck over to Maremount to tell him. “When Pratt dies, I’ll be free.”
“When Ben Pratt dies, we’ll all be free,” Cadan answered.
Aptuxet Trail
Two men in flat-brimmed, black hats with buckles on them rounded the bend with a heavily-laden horse, and Cadan’s soul caught fire in his chest. When one chanced to look up, Cadan saw it was Pratt. When he recognized the second man as the one who’d opened the gates of Maremount for the enemy, if Cadan had paused it would only have been to smile.
Instead, he cocked his blunderbuss as he stepped into the trail twenty feet before them. With a gasp, Pratt’s servant dashed for the trees, and Cadan, seeing no need to waste words on a warning, pulled the trigger. Hammer falling, the flint struck hard against the frizzen, sparking the powder with a deafening blast and a tongue of fire. The swarm of marble-sized lead pierced the traitor’s body, red flowers blooming from his face and throat. Before the man even fell, Cadan charged Pratt, twirling his bearskin in front of him as a blind as Pratt tore a pistol from his belt.
The pistol fired but Cadan felt nothing until he slammed into Pratt, who stumbled back against the horse. Pratt fell under its belly and rolled away, jumping to his feet on the icy ground on the animal’s other side. The horse whinnied and reared on its back legs between them as both men unsheathed their swords, Cadan having to drop his gun to draw. The panicked horse reared again, slipping in the ice and sliding toward Pratt, who jumped aside just in time as the horse went briefly down, then rebounded and galloped down the path heading south.
Ben lunged with his blade; Cadan parried and riposted; Ben counter attacked and redoubled, slashing over Cadan’s head as the latter slipped on the icy trail.
“Looking for another scar, Moon?” Pratt mocked as Cadan parried in retreat. “I’m running out of places to mark you!”
Pratt extended his sword as if to flèche, but Cadan saw he’d had only done it as a distraction to draw a pistol he was struggling to cock in his left hand. Cadan ducked under the feint and kicked Pratt’s front leg out from under him as he stepped, sweeping him. Pratt fell back-first with a loud whoopf, and Cadan leapt on his rival, pinning his arms to the ground with his knees.
“What am I, Pratt? A father with no children—what’s the word for it, you bastard?” Cadan shouted. smashing the pommel of his sword into Pratt’s mouth and nose again and again, teeth flying, blood splattering the icy grass until the man went limp without answering. “I’m the Devil, Pratt! That’s what I am!” Cadan bellowed. “I’m the Devil come for his due!”
Dropping his sword, Cadan pulled his dagger and proceeded to turn Pratt’s body into a monument to his pain. He carved Morton’s name into Pratt’s face, then Sarah’s, then stripped Pratt’s shirt and carved into his chest the names of his parents, his dead sister, the boys who’d run with the pack in Old Plymouth. He flipped the bloodied torso over and slashed the name of the traitor who’d given up Maremount Plantation across Pratt’s shoulders along with the names or initials of every man he could think of—Standish, Wollaston, and His Majesty King Charles the First. Panting, he flipped the moaning Pratt back over and carved his best idea of an elephant in what remained of Pratt’s left cheek. When he finished, Pratt was naked and bloody but breathing, if barely. Cadan then relieved him of both ears and—in memory of Sarah—the soft tip of his nose.
Pressing the knife to Pratt’s throat, Cadan remembered the words a drunken Thomas Morton had once spoken—though in self-pitying reference to himself—“Sometimes the worst thing the world can do to a man is to spare him, Cadan. By far the worst thing.” It took enormous will, but after flicking Pratt’s nose into the underbrush, Cadan stepped away and let him live.
He checked Pratt’s companion and found him dead. When he whirled his bearskin over his head to put it back on, he saw a hole in it from Pratt’s missed shot. He hoped it wouldn’t let the rain in. Then he gathered the weapons and loped off in pursuit of the horse. The world was still the world, after all, and no Dutch captain ever let a man ride for free.
by 
Zakariah Johnson
Latest posts by Zakariah Johnson (see all)
- Ambuscade on the Aptuxet Trail - May 10, 2021
Bloody good stuff! Those Pilgrims sure knew how to party!