Blow

by Daniel Nayeri

  And now, for this, the Prince Kaiser’s greatest ambition, every single room in every wing was occupied by a pair of artists. Bards played lyres to the interpretive dancing of their partners. Potters spun their wheels, and muralists tried to paint the creations as they spun. A sausage maker and a pickler made a discovery the world wouldn’t soon forget. The hairstylists worked themselves into a corner real quick, except for the one who was paired with the doll maker, and the one with the juggling bear.

  It was pretty much a mad soup. The prince was throwing in every ingredient he could think of, figuring he’d hit the right combination eventually. And until that happened, it was awfully fun seeing how many times Brutessa could fold a person in half.

  As I said, everyone knew that the only conceivable chance of success was in the creation of a vase full of quilted flowers and painted marbles — a pairing so sublime that every tomb in Old Timey Europe would be left empty. The perished would rise, for heaven’s advantage would be no more, brought low by the hands of two men — great and mighty in craft.

  Except the problem was that the two buzzards were quibbling the whole time about which one of their kids seduced the other one and ruined the chances of a classy wedding.

  The next thing that happened was that Chloe escaped the castle and Giacomo got his skull cracked by Brutessa and fell into what they used to call “a mortal sweat.”

  WHEN GIACOMO AND Chloe were imprisoned, Prince Kaiser Dimple Pimple forgot to have them separated. Not for propriety, mind you. This was the same prince, after all, who kept mermaids in his bathtub. He should have separated them because of Brutessa.

  He just assumed that the pirate queen would forget all about Giacomo as soon as he was out of her sight. So he’d locked them both in the northeast wing, which technically wasn’t a wing so much as a buttressed outcrop on the cliff side of the castle. It had been boarded up ever since the suspicious passing of Dimple Pimple’s parents. The secret wing was where the prince grew up, a lonely brat with room after room dedicated to building blocks, trampolines, and merry-go-rounds. Now the abandoned dark halls felt like a haunted carnevale.

  But the prince had underestimated the strength of Brutessa’s first emotion. She had become a broken-down machine. A killing machine, but still. Among the land pirates, the rumor was going around that she had lost her edge. But it wasn’t that. She’d just changed her focus. She was still the pirate queen, but now she wanted Giacomo as her king.

  And so Brutessa boiled the thought of killing Chloe in her stomach, until finally she decided to act. Brutessa drove a cart at full gallop to the northeast wing and sent a giggly keelhauler crashing through the boarded-up double doors.

  A mile farther up the grand corridor, past the hall of naked bathtub portraits from the prince’s childhood, and then she reached Chloe’s room. When she bashed open the door, she saw Giacomo, wrapped in Chloe’s arms, drawing a plan for escape. Brutessa would have been horrified, but she’d never been horrified before, so she just let out a gurgly hiccup. In the silent second before Brutessa went manic, Giacomo whispered one of the only French words he had learned into Chloe’s ear. “Sugarlips,” he said, but Chloe knew it meant, “Run.”

  The emotions were coming three at a time now for Brutessa. Envy. Insecurity. Panic. The desire to read more fashion magazines and learn 57 seduction secrets. She swung her arms in no discernible rhythm or direction, punching herself as often as not, charging around the room.

  I got a rush call to the scene. I expected one or all three of them to be breathless by the time I got there. But no, I arrived as Giacomo covered Chloe with his body and Brutessa ran around hiccuping and sending shards of anything that got in her way into the air. I wasn’t there long before one of her wild swings connected with Giacomo’s head and sent him flying into a dresser. His body landed with a toothy clack on the floorboards.

  Both Chloe and Brutessa froze. I was already walking up to him to say hello when his back heaved a few unexpected breaths.

  Brutessa expressed her first grief by rushing up to the body of Giacomo and wailing like an orca. She alternately beat her own head and nibbled on the unconscious man’s toes. Chloe had the intuition that Brutessa wouldn’t hurt him. She would be of better use if she escaped. She edged toward the door, slowly, in between the phlegmy sobs of the pirate queen. Meanwhile, messengers had been dispatched across the palace to inform the prince that his war general had gone insane . . . more insane.

  Chloe slipped across the hall, into a broom closet, just as the prince arrived at full gallop. Prince Dimple Pimple slid off his horse and tied the reins on the doorknob of the broom closet. Chloe held her breath. The prince marched into the room to see Brutessa weeping and Giacomo unconscious.

  Thankfully, a violist in the prince’s soundtrack entourage had some medical training. From what he could tell, the knock had jostled Giacomo’s brain loose. He’d make it but barely, and only if he didn’t suffer another concussion for a while. Even a strong shake would push him over the brink.

  At this point I had to leave. The prince was the first to notice that Chloe was gone. The kazooist in his entourage performed a cartoon surprise noise. Then Brutessa made him eat the kazoo. I rushed the musician to Dora. When she asked him his name, he did a disappointed wah-wah-waaaah. Then I returned to the castle and found Chloe.

  The reason I had to stay with her is obvious, or it should be, if you’ve ever been in love. Giacomo could have shoved off at any minute, stepped through my door, answered the eternal footman, yours truly. But if he did, the part I was interested in wasn’t with him in that bed. He’d already given it away. So when I came to collect for one Mr. Giacomo “Co-Co” Chianti, good servant, novice marble painter, a guide on the most excellent way, well, I wouldn’t find it lying there with him. I’d have to find Chloe first.

  And I’d honestly hate to, but I’d have to take it from her.

  WHILE GIACOMO WAS ailing in his delirious half-sleep, Chloe snuck through the northeast wing. I kept back, out of sight. Poor girl had already met me once. When the prince noticed her gone, he ordered a search party to find her and put Brutessa in the group, which implied biting her face off when they did. Then he ordered his carriage to the north tower.

  In the meantime, Babbo stood at Pierre’s sewing station and held up a swatch of fabric as though it was a dirty tissue. “You know what makes me think your job is useless, Pierre?” said Babbo. “It’s that you essentially make a replica of nature. It’s like tracing someone else’s paintings.”

  Pierre sat in Babbo’s chair, with his feet propped on the marble-painting table. The glass rods were piled by an unused burner. Paints sat in clean tubs in manufactured rows. Neither of the men had moved a single ingredient from its position. Pierre responded, “You wouldn’t know craftsmanship if it was on a dinner menu, you boar. You make toys for children. Choke hazards at that.”

  “You realize that I can grow more flowers on a compost heap than you could make in a lifetime?”

  “I gag just looking at them.”

  They heard the carriage wheels careen around the tower and the prince’s high-heeled boots on the stone. The door slammed open, but the old rivals were far too busy to acknowledge Dimple Pimple.

  “What would you do without a real flower to copy?”

  “What would you do without the money-rich and taste-poor middle class?”

  The prince cleared his throat. His trumpeter and his bass drummer remixed a few beats. But Babbo and Pierre had decades of snipes saved up. They shouted over the intro music.

  “I always knew you flower quilters were sycophants to actual florists. It’s obvious the vases would be better with my painted marbles and a few votives to accent the light.”

  Pierre’s mustache twitched. “You, you . . . hairy man! You’ve got those glassblowers of Murano over-blowing vases into every fat shape so they need filler. And that’s what you make, decorative packing peanuts!”

  The prince shouted “—!” The men didn’t no
tice.

  “You make forgeries of true beauty.”

  “You wouldn’t know beauty if it was on a dinner menu.”

  “See? You said that already. You’ve begun copying yourself.”

  “Your work looks like deer pellets.”

  “That’s good. I could spread the pellets in my garden and grow flowers for you to steal.”

  The prince had his trumpets blast the two men into silence. They looked irritated.

  “What?” said the two men.

  The prince asked if they were ever going to get to work. Pierre answered, “Of course not.”

  Babbo added, “I’d like brioche toast with my omelet tomorrow.”

  “That does sound nice. I’d like some, too,” said Pierre. Then he turned to Babbo and said, “What do you think, a sweet Italian sausage inside?”

  “Yes, with basil and fleur de sel,” added Babbo, “and cracked pepper on the side.”

  “Perfect,” said Pierre.

  The two legends of house decoratives looked at Prince Kaiser with “That will be all” eyebrows. Prince Kaiser Dimple Pimple considered shoving both of them out of the tower window. Then he considered the diplomatic unrest of killing two national treasures. And the expense alone of cleaning the memorial tribute that fans would build around his castle. All those stuffed bears and tacky painted signs. And gum, why do people think prayer walls need gum to be effective?

  The prince ground his heel into the stone as he turned. It scraped like a mortar and pestle. As he strutted out, he told them to keep an eye on the courtyard below their tower. The men didn’t ask why, but he answered, anyway. Because that’s where he’d execute Chloe and Giacomo.

  A few minutes later, Babbo and Pierre could make out the figures of their two children trudging across the courtyard with hoods over their heads.

  Babbo and Pierre were fear-stricken and held hands as they watched from the tower high above the scaffold. The two young lovers also held hands so that Chloe could support Giacomo in his wobbly half-conscious state. They ascended the stairs toward a portly middle-aged executioner in traditional costume (no shirt, black hood). He had a berserker sword twice the size of his body, used for breaking a cavalry or crushing a boulder. He leaned on it as though it didn’t weigh anything.

  Giacomo and Chloe looked up beseechingly at their fathers. One could just imagine their horrified expression under the black hoods they wore. Then they kneeled on the block, forsaken.

  Babbo chewed on his own mustache. The executioner sighed and raised his sword. Pierre pulled at the remnants of his hair and said, “Tell him we’ll do what he says. Tell him —” Babbo inflated his lungs to shout into the courtyard. “WAIT!”

  But it was too late. The executioner had made his swing. The massive sword lopped off both the prisoners’ heads. They bounced.

  Babbo beat his chest. Pierre’s heart shattered again along the same cracks as the first time. Chloe walked up behind them and leaned her chin on Pierre’s shoulder. “What’re you watching?” she said.

  Babbo and Pierre whipped around. They bellowed their joy, hugged Chloe, and wept some more. Chloe never got the answer to her question, which would have been something like, “An elaborate staged execution of you and your boyfriend.” When the prince looked up from the edge of the courtyard and didn’t see the faces of the two craftsmen dotting the window frame, he was again furious.

  The prince had dragged Vlad the Regaler from his loft in Moscow and even let him direct, as well as star, in the charade. Vlad had played the executioner, a silent yet emotionally complex role.

  The victims were actually cantaloupes inside the hoods. The two supporting actors ducked their heads into their collars and let the melons fall. I was there by sheer coincidence. A pigeon flying overhead got a bug in its throat, choked, and crashed onto the courtyard stones not ten seconds later.

  Prince Kaiser stormed off, ordered the doctors out of Giacomo’s room, and almost killed him when he grabbed Giacomo by the hair and said in his ear, “—.”

  It was pretty standard evil-guy stuff. Something like: “As soon as this is over, I will butcher you personally. I’ll give your body to Brutessa for dinner, and I’ll bronze Chloe into a naked statue on my front lawn.”

  Okay, maybe not so standard.

  In the tower, Chloe explained everything to the dads. Her plan, for now, was to nurse Giacomo back to health. After that, escape. She would sneak around the castle in search of food and medicine. There were plenty of empty rooms to hide in now that so many artists had been murdered. But more than anything, she needed Babbo and Pierre to quit angering the prince. They would have to work together. Pierre took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve. Babbo looked off into the far corner of the ceiling. “Isn’t their some other way?” said Pierre.

  “Yeah,” said Babbo. “Couldn’t we just stop throwing things at each other?”

  “We’re geniuses, you know,” said Pierre.

  “We have genius ways,” added Babbo.

  “No,” said Chloe. Pierre’s mustache twitched. Chloe’s freckle above her lip twitched even more. “I love him,” said Chloe, “and I love you. Now, sit.” After all her years of acquiescence, Chloe had finally stood up for herself. Nobody could refuse her, especially not those two. Giovanni Babbo Chianti and Pierre Vouvray finally had to agree on something.

  As she left, she leaned up and kissed Babbo on the cheek. Then she hugged her father and kissed him twice. “Please be good, Daddy.”

  “Be safe,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You forget I’ve wilted once already. Fate must have a different plan for me than simply getting beheaded and dropped in a ditch.”

  This happens a lot with people who refer to me as Fate. But as I said, I don’t do any of the planning. And I’ve found plenty of people lying in ditches. I have a huge tramp collection. But it was nice of her to comfort Pierre.

  She rushed out. Babbo was still blushing, with a hand on his cheek. He jostled Pierre with a pat on the back and said, “She’s wonderful.”

  “I know,” said Pierre. “It’s yours that’s the problem.”

  “Nope,” said Babbo. “They’ll have fat and talented babies.”

  Prince Kaiser and Chloe almost passed each other in the hall. As she ran down the grand stairway, Chloe heard the thunder of hoofbeats and raced back up the stairs. She stayed barely in front of the horses as she circled the massive tower. Finally, she reached the landing and flattened herself to the wall on the left. Prince Kaiser’s horse galloped up the stairs and went right. Chloe snuck back down as Prince Kaiser dismounted the horse, kicked open the door, and blitzed into the room. The prince was so enraged that he was willing to wreck his own plans and kill both of the old artists. Instead, he found Babbo and Pierre bent over their tables, working in silence. They looked quite similar, actually, in their finely tuned focus. The prince opened his mouth to shout, rethought the idea, and closed it again. Babbo’s precision, as he cut a marble in half with the Hair from the Chest of the Monster Bernardo the Hammer, was not something to interrupt. Likewise, Pierre was stitching the stamens on a posy of baby’s breath — a process so delicate it required even the baby to stop breathing. The prince didn’t have anything to do but wheel back around a second time and leave.

  TO DESCRIBE THE work of Babbo and Pierre, as they combined their craftsmanship for the sake of their kids’ lives, is a job I’m not up for. The thing is, I’m what you might call a closer, a cleaner, a last-call kind of guy. I’m not a morning person. The glass is all empty and has shattered on the floor. Feel me? I watch stuff break. The great and terrible ballet of destruction.

  So if I see Chloe, and I tell you her lips were nova, her smile was supernova, it’s because I’ve seen about a million stars explode with a brilliant but terminal glow. I know Giacomo is a good guy ’cause I’ve seen him cradling his piglet as it bled out a wolf bite. I know Brutessa and Dimple Pimple, because their insides have extensive rot.

  Bu
t what the dads were doing in that tower, that’s about as far from my expertise as eons are from ions. They were creating something. Giving it life, in its own way. Making the new. I wouldn’t know what that looks like. I’ll tell you, though; I bet it’s wonderful.

  Inside the city limits of the castle, everyone was silent under penalty of dwarf. Word had spread that the masters were finally working together. As the cooks made cold, quiet meals of bologna and coleslaw, they snuck glances out their windows of the north tower. It seemed like a constant trail of colored smoke flowed from Babbo’s annealing oven.

  The surviving artists considered themselves saved. The prince’s attention was entirely on the tower. He listened at the door for hours at a time, but all he could hear was Babbo as he hummed, then whistled, sang a few bars, then asked something like, “What do you think, Vouvray, magenta?”

  Pierre responded with a grunt. Babbo considered it, then said, “You’re right. I didn’t even think of that. But what do I do with all this magenta I already mixed?”

  By the end of the third straight day, the north tower had washes of every color streaking down its side.

  During this time, it was Chloe who had it hardest. She had to evade Brutessa’s murderous hunt but also tend to Giacomo, since the doctors had been ordered away. She spent the three days running through the castle, stealing towels and soup in a locked-down complex full of guards, servants, and land pirates.

  She almost collapsed from exhaustion. When she stole into Giacomo’s room that third day, Giacomo stirred in his semiconscious state and groaned something indecipherable. He seemed to be recovering. For the first time in three days, Chloe smiled. The curtains had been pulled back, and the light seemed to admire her with its shine. Anyone could fall in love with Chloe.