*The 'Bagpiper' Is A Brilliant Composer And Musician, (Gods Help You,) And One Of The Conch Trumpet Players Can Compose But Only Plays Passably While The Other Is A Gifted Performer But Cant Compose To Save Her Life...*

You watch in mental anguish as the musicians make a royal cacophony while transposing their songs into their new registers, then sit through a much more relaxing tough still sometimes difficult concertina as each of them by turns performs the pieces they both wrote and transposed. Much of this music, of course, will hopefully end up on the cutting room floor of history in 100 years time, but, that does leave several pieces that you feel are worthy of being remembered centuries from now, some are simple, one is little more than a lullaby, yet, you feel that one day it will be used to sing babies to sleep the length and breadth of the Empire... Another runs a touch longer than the others, yet, you hear in it the beginnings of something that could one day be similar to "The Army Keeps Rolling Along" for the Aztek Empire's army...

And then there's the Gods Damned Bagpiper...

You are prepared to hate his music, to loathe and despise his caterwauling shrieking butchered misbegotten excuse for an instrument and anything played by it...

You can't; it's just too beautiful.

Both of his pieces are very short, less than a minute each, but each of them moves everyone listening to tears. The first one speaks to you of HOME, of a lost and half-forgotten place where you were safe and happy, where your mother's heartbeat was the only sound you heard and you were never hungry or cold. Then the song just stops, and you are back in the world, knowing you will never truly be in such a place again ere **** claims you, and almost as one, everyone listening weeps, their tears for the lost time of before their birth hot and wild! The second piece is very different, this is the one he transposed, and you scarcely recognize it. It was played during the first round by a potter on a clay flute and was supposed to represent the battle between the Eagle and the Serpent at the founding of Tenochtitlan, but, while it did that, to a degree, it was not fully acclaimed by you as capturing the essence of the image that you've seen adorning so many blankets and frescoes throughout the city.

This song, this captures it!

The opening notes are the screech of the Eagle's cry as it descends toward the Snake with its talons extended! Then the Snake hisses in defiance! There is a flutter as the Eagle's wings scramble on the air snatching the Snake up! The Eagle's beak strikes to kill the Viper! And then, it is done, and the song ends. In only slightly more time than the actual event would have taken the story is retold in music, the event which led to the founding of Tenochtitlan on this very site*.
*(Actually, a couple hundred feet up the palace mount from here, but, eh...)

The other two standouts of the day are the two sisters with the conch trumpets. One, it is obvious, is a brilliant composer: both her pieces are artfully arranged and devised, complex and flavorful, clearly pushing the bounds of what she is capable of with her instrument: and that's the problem. She is going to rival the esteem with which western culture regards Johann Sebastian Bach among the annals of your civilization's composers, but most distinctly NOT that with which Trumpeters such as Louis Armstrong A.K.A. 'Satchmo' are regarded. Her sister by contrast, (you think they are fraternal twins,) has the exact opposite problem, she can't compose to save her life, but her skill as a Trumpeter echoes that of the Arch-Angel Gabriel! When she blows on that conch the first time you flinch, half expecting the dome of heaven to crack asunder and the sun to come tumbling from the sky! By the end of her second performance, you realize that you may have found both the equivalent of the first violin of your royal orchestra for the foreseeable future and its composer-in-residence...

Other, lesser lights, of course, shine in this firmament, but those three are like the sun and twin moons, the problem is, but rarely can you have both sun and moon visible in the sky at the same time, and when both try to stand at high noon, you wind up with an eclipse: you must choose who will lead the ensemble, the bagpiper who moves men to tears, or the twin talents of the trumpet? You know nothing about any of them save their instrumental abilities and rough appearances, in his case a fairly handsome fellow with long dark hair, clean teeth, and quite the bulge in his loincloth standing about 5'4": in their's, young women in their late-teens-to-early-twenties both with stretch marks indicating they've had at least one child, (probably more,) smallish C-cup breasts with wide areola and big nipples, and the begginings of laugh lines around the eyes standing about 5-foot-even: in all cases the copperish skin, brown eyes, and hooked noses that are typical of your subjects.