CW5 Character Development

Brian Spenser

Mercy's Pirates

Dull thuds of booted footfalls alternated with hollow clicks of a wooden peg as the pirate captain paced the deck in front of his ragged crew. The hot sun beat down on sweaty brows and tricornered felt. The peg-legged man, ironically known as Captain Mercy, squinted up into the sun to see the Jolly Roger luffing high above, its fiendish sneer mimicking his scarred face. Mercy’s pride and only love, his 41-gun schooner the Lady Knife, was riding the swell a league east of Barbados. Many called this passage the blood sea, due to the sanguine hue it retains after the sounds of cannon fire have been carried away on the evening’s breeze. Situated directly on the trade wind corridor, many a fat merchantman would here be forced to run the gambit between pirates, privateers, and treacherous waters.

Mercy knew that his crew was restless. None had been ashore to carouse with women or brawl in the bars for almost two months, and there had been no plunder for the last three weeks. The men were hungry for blood and loot, and Mercy could smell that some were beginning to develop an appetite for mutiny, too. The water barrels were running low, but, for the captain, returning to port without a prize was as good as signing his own death warrant. Mercy paused a moment and thought. The crew needed a display of how good it was to be one of Mercy’s Pirates. Now all he needed was a little luck.

Mercy thought back to his earlier life, remembering the luck that had gotten him to where he was. What was life but luck? At the age of fifteen, he had stabbed one of his mother’s lovers and run away from his mother and younger brother, a stowaway outbound from Portsmouth on the good ship HMS Justice. The whole voyage he remained undiscovered, his only friend his knife, the instrument of his first kill. It began to speak to him as the days wore into weeks, and the weeks wore on into months. The knife told him strong and righteous he was, and how he deserved so much form life. He sat staring at its cool, silver-black blade for hours; he remembered asking it question after question, asking it why his mother’s lovers had beat him, why he never had enough to eat, why he always had to run, and on and on forever. The knife reassured him in the softest tones that all would be well. All he had to do was take what was rightfully his. And so he did.

After the Justice made landfall and Mercy escaped from the confines of its hold, he found himself in a marketplace, assailed by strange sights and sounds. His clearest recollection from his first arrival in the Caribbean was the corpse of a man, all the evidence of a rough life and rougher death redolent on his body, lying neglected on the sandy beach. He smiled as he remembered how he checked the corpse’s pockets for money. Finding none, he had noticed how unusually thick the soles of the dead man’s boots were and pried them apart. There he found a considerable trove of gold pieces; there was enough to keep him fed for a year, at least.

Mercy was not a God-fearing man, and so he assumed that God must fear him because of his miraculous and never-ending font of good fortune. When he was eighteen, he inherited a brace of ornate silver-embossed pistols from a man he killed. After that, and many dead men later, he found himself in command of his very own vessel, which he had named for his protector, his knife. He didn’t care how many died, Mercy was going to get what he wanted, and he wanted to be the most black-hearted pirate ever to prowl the seas.

The watchman’s voice sounded from the crow’s nest, breaking his reverie. A merchantman was in sight. Flying English colors, she was low in the water. Mercy sprang into action; this was it, lads, the long-awaited booty. He shouted orders to his crew, and with the promise of plunder, they all set about rhythmic motion, looking more like a well-oiled machine than a crew of drunk, toothless, illiterate brutes. Soon the excitement of the chase took over and bloodlust rose in Captain Mercy; before he knew it yet another ship was boarded and captured.

Her captain knelt at Mercy’s feet, his eyes lowered to the deck. In his moment of absolute triumph, Mercy felt like God himself, wrathful and omnipotent. Moments like these were what he had been working toward his whole life. He put his knife to the other captain’s chin and raised his head with the blade. Mercy had his speech ready to go; he had rehearsed it in his head a thousand times. He was looking forward to humiliating this man and then feeding him to the sharks that always hovered about the Lady Knife. Mercy had never considered himself a cultured man, but this was a form of theater in which he indulged.

As he raised the man’s eyes to meet his own, however, he felt a shock like a bolt of ice to heart. The eyes he was staring into were his own. But no mirror had been raised between the two men; no trick was played by the light. They were his eyes—his brother’s eyes. The cold hand of panic grabbed hold of his stomach and he staggered backwards a few steps. Then he remembered his audience. Mercy turned and glanced at his crew. Many countenances were stupefied, some looked suspicious; all expected Mercy to be his usual merciless self.

Mercy fished for words. His speech, full of vitriol and invective, was enirely forgotten. Never had he been so affected in his life. Throughout countless years of bloodshed, the life of the man kneeling before him was one that his knife told him he could not take. His arm, a lead weight, steadfastly refused to draw a weapon and his remaining good leg refused to kick the man contemptuously to the deck.

But no! Such hesitation would be the end of him, as his crew would take him as weak and immediately become mutinous. The crew of pirates now paralleled the sharks that dogged the Lady Knife, and their captain’s paralysis was a spreading red stain of blood in the water. Though Mercy knew this, he was overcome by the moment. He had killed that lover of his mother’s all those years ago because the man had beaten his brother almost to death. On a small island of which only Captain Mercy knew the location there was a stash of gold from years spent at a pirate’s work that he intended to one day share with his brother, this beaten man before him.

Suddenly, Mercy felt something grip his shoulder. He spun around, but there was nobody there. It happened again, and Mercy spun again and drew his pistol. Yet, again, there was nobody in front of him. Horror spread across his face as the sheen of blood coats the floor beneath the victim of a stabbing. He kept turning one way and the other, trying to confront the specter of Davy Jones that was so instantly taunting him. If fate were going to be so cruel, he would fight fate. If God were going to give him a choice between his life and his brother’s, he would fight God. And then there was just blackness for Mercy, as the new captain of the Lady Knife smashed open his skull with a large wooden plank and watched Mercy’s broken body crumple to the ground. Luck of the draw. The crew then turned their attention to Mercy’s brother.