[Crooked Playhouse] The Port of Ahnatep, i.

[Ifran]

29th Spring, 512 A.V. Musical composition was still something that eluded Ifran; he knew music, had the wit of a poet, but these creations, these births, were long and painful. He hid them away from everyone who might see him with his masks stripped away, but he sat in one of the practice rooms, the walls lined in cork to tamp out the sound. He was alone in silence, but there was music within him scrabbling to get out. Perhaps he was homesick. Perhaps he was tired of inferior creatures speaking to him as if they were his equals or his superiors. Laughable. One hand held the clipboard with its parchment sheets already lined and prepared for the complicated musical notation of his art. Another held the stylus and made notations, wrote words. He composed an ode to his home, bitter and transcendent. At least, he hoped it would be. His voice sounded, finding the proper key for this section. Frowning, he made a correction. There were so many details, but he was of the eight-limbed people; his mind was used to directing eight limbs at the same time, and so was prepared for tasking many things at once. "In the port of Ahnatep," he sang, then frowned, making more notation. "In the port of Ahnatep." The melody was slightly different now, his modulation altering all that went before and after. His other hands moved, gestured in Semhu fashion, and danced in time to the music within him, physical manifestations of his art. Here they split the arts: actor, dancer, singer, writer. Ifran was a poet, a performer. He did all of them because all of them were required of a performer upon the stage. To his mind, each time he stepped upon those boards, it was an opportunity to commune with both his audience and the gods in the Ukalas. After several minutes of correcting the notation to reflect the one change, he turned as if his audience was behind him and offered them his song in his imagination. "In the port of Ahnatep, There's a sailor who sings Of the dreams that he brings From the wide open sea." It was quiet and pensive, with a tension and stateliness one might expect from one of his race, but this was a blending of the high art and exoticism of his own art form and what he had learned musically from these Alvads. He was writing in Common, for the gods' sake, after all. "In the port of Ahnatep, There's a sailor who sleeps While the riverbank weeps With the old willow tree." The build was hardly noticeable, and here the extreme precision of his art would be lost upon an audience in Alvadas, but perhaps Ionu would notice or -- and here he blasphemed -- fuck Ionu. Ifran had come from the lap of luxury wearing what amounted to sackcloth and ashes, abasing himself to the favorites of the deity and for what? For what? No attention was given to the worthy and more than worthy. "In the port of Ahnatep, There's a sailor who dies, Full of beer, full of cries, In a drunken down fight." Nobody here would understand the nuance of what he wrote, even as they barely registered the build in the music, not only in volume, but in the orchestration whose notes he tabulated with speed and dexterity. There was a Southwinder that any denizen of Ahnatep would know, the glory and the defeat, the story and the legend that grew up around the lovely bones of truth. Art was truth set on fire, and the fire of the song was smoldering in Ifran's belly, soon to rage out of his mouth if the notes and words supported it properly. "And in the port of Ahnatep, There's a sailor who's born On a muggy hot morn By the dawn's early light." Even a mere Alvad would sense the tempo picking up now, and he made precise notations for the accelerations in the music, trying to bore a hole into the song and find its soul. The somnambulant sway of the music grew too, not quite syncopating, but sauntering and bumping into things like a drunk sailor at port, drinking Eypharian beer and claiming Zeltivan kelp beer superior, hated by all and rightfully so. The music, so controlled in truth, seemed to fight the bonds and strictures of his writing, but it worked for him and the audience shouldn't know. Oh, he would have to change that part before he sang it for an audience. He intended to sing the hells out of it, the cultured, controlled prince of the desert losing his cool to a song about destitute pirates and their star-cross'd love affairs. "In the port of Ahnatep, Where the sailors all meet, There's a sailor who eats Only fishheads and tails. He will show you his teeth That have rotted too soon That can swallow the moon That can haul up the sails. And he yells to the cook With his arms open wide 'Bring me more fish; Put it down by my side.' Then he wants so to belch But he's too full to try So he gets up and laughs And he zips up his fly..." Just as he was starting to catch a sort of frenzied spirit, he stopped and shook his head. The stylus went to parchment with a will, crossing things out and fixing issues. He was not the greatest composer, but damned if he wouldn't make this song as perfect as possible. Somehow. Someday.