A Meeting of Two Worlds – 198th Annual Brierly Harvest Festival

The hundred-and-ninety-eighth Brierly Harvest Festival was the first the settlement had ever shared with anyone from beyond its own valley. The festival that had marked the close of every Brierly year for the better part of two centuries became, on this one night, the occasion on which the town opened its borders to the wider world. It was remembered ever in the settlement as A Meeting of Two Worlds.

For the whole of its history Brierly had believed itself alone. That belief had broken some weeks earlier, when an exploration party from the young settlement of Bixbus — the Vineyard Venture Exploration, led by Elias Bradbury — followed the river and found the town that had kept to itself for a century and a half. The discovery had fallen on Brierly as both wonder and dread. There was a wider Clivilius after all, and it had been living and changing the whole time the settlement had thought itself the only thing in the world.

Bixbus was a settlement only weeks old, founded by people who still held the power to cross between Clivilius and Earth, and it carried with it everything Brierly had done without since the last of its Guardians had died — change, machinery, knowledge, a road back to the world the founders had left. The town was divided over what to make of it. Some welcomed the prospect; others feared it. Samuel Fletcher, the settlement's leader, judged that Brierly could not stay sealed against the wider world for ever, and resolved that if change was to come, it would come on the town's own terms rather than be forced upon it. He extended an invitation to the festival.

As the festival opened, Bradbury came to the square with his companion, Sophie McMonagle — the first outsiders ever to stand among the town for the Harvest Festival. The people of Brierly received them with curiosity and caution in equal measure, gathering in clusters to watch the newcomers and to weigh, in their own minds, what the arrival of strangers meant for a place that had known none in living memory or in any memory before it.

Fletcher led the two of them through the festival as it unfolded, and they took in a celebration that had scarcely altered in two hundred years. The lanterns hung as they always had; the long tables ran the length of the square, heavy with bread and roasting meat; the players took up the old tunes. The visitors were seeing, kept whole, what a century and a half of isolation had preserved exactly as it was — a festival that anywhere else in Clivilius would have changed beyond recognition, and here had not changed at all.

The visitors were drawn into the festival as it ran. They watched the First Pour made as it had been made every year, by the senior vintner of a founding family broaching the season's first cask before the assembled town. They were pulled into the Cask Race and sent struggling with their barrels through the narrow streets while the crowd cheered them on. And they failed, wholly and cheerfully, at the Grape Stomp, McMonagle losing her footing in the vat and going down backwards in a spray of juice, so that the square laughed with the two of them rather than at them.

The caution thawed as the evening went on. The oldest vintner in Brierly pressed a cup of dark red into Bradbury's hand and told him, not unkindly, to drink and learn something of real craft. The strangers ate at the long tables, drank the new wine, and were folded, hour by hour, into a celebration that had never before had room in it for anyone from outside.

It was a single moment, late in the night, that the town remembered above all the rest. As the Festival Fire burned down, McMonagle took out a guitar — an instrument never before seen in Brierly — and played a folk ballad she had carried from Earth. The melody was at once foreign and impossibly familiar. The founders had brought the same tunes across with them, and the town had kept its own version of them, passed from grandmother to grandchild for two hundred years, without ever knowing that another world still sang them.

The square fell silent to hear it. Two peoples who had been parted for a century and a half, who had each believed the other did not exist, discovered in the space of a single song that they had spent all that time singing the same melodies apart. The distance between what Brierly had been and what it was now becoming seemed, for the length of the ballad, to close to nothing.

By the night's end the two settlements drank together. Samuel Fletcher raised his cup to the land and the hands that worked it and the new voices that had joined them; the visitors lifted theirs alongside his, and the whole of Brierly followed. The festival that had always marked the end of the settlement's year had become the beginning of something else, and the borders that had stood closed since the founders' time were, from that night, open.