Raxus Secundus: History, Culture and Stories

By the time the first chime sounded across Grand Market Square, the children beside me had already chosen which instrument they wanted to hear. One favoured the strings. Another pointed at a service droid standing behind a suspended cargo panel and announced, with considerable confidence, that the largest instrument would win.

The droid gave its panel a delicate tap. The child looked betrayed.

Then the reeds entered, a rhythm plate answered from the other side of the stage, and the Cultural Harmony Festival began.

After weeks of preparation, Raxulon’s performers welcomed their first festival audiences tonight across the square, the Kaelor Amphitheatre and the Reflection Gardens. The programme announced last month promised music, theatre, food and art made across communities. Its opening evening delivered that promise through a succession of encounters, some carefully rehearsed and others happily beyond anyone’s control.

The Crowd Finds Its Part

The opening ensemble began quietly enough for the chimes to carry to the tea stalls. Young string and reed players stood among service droids equipped with recovered panels, bells and rhythm plates. Several students behind the dancing-droid holo worked around the stage, watching performers and checking the small lights used to pass cues.

During combined rehearsals, those cues had needed repeated adjustment. Tonight the amber wrist light was clearly visible, and the service droid whose position had been shifted across the stage saw the first change of rhythm without difficulty.

The audience was less predictable. A patch of enthusiastic clapping near the front accelerated well ahead of the musicians. People farther back joined a beat later. For several bars, the square offered the ensemble two competing versions of its own piece.

An organic percussionist lifted her hand and held it still. The strings sustained their notes. A droid tapped four widely spaced beats on its rhythm plate, leaving enough room for the crowd to hear itself. On the next cue, the players returned together and the clapping settled around them.

“We practised people being late,” one student told me afterwards. “We should have practised people being very keen.”

There were passages of considerable delicacy: a reed phrase passed to a row of chimes, then answered by strings while a low note trembled through the cargo panel. The droid playing it finally delivered the great rolling sound my young neighbour had been waiting for. He raised both arms in vindication.

When the piece ended, several performers looked towards one another before turning to the audience. Their relief was visible even from the back of the square. A service droid kept its mallet raised until the last vibration had faded.

Between Performances

The gaps in the programme gave the square time to change shape. Families moved towards food stalls, musicians carried cases into the arcade, and a small crowd gathered around a repairer reseating a loose key on a reed instrument.

The repair took longer than the demonstration was meant to last. Its owner waited beside the bench, occasionally trying the other keys, while visitors offered advice of sharply varying usefulness. When the repaired note finally sounded, it received a brief round of applause from people holding cups of junno root tea.

Along the stalls, visiting cooks explained preserved fruits and coastal clam dishes to customers who sometimes knew the place of origin but had never tasted its food. A child asked whether everything from Tamwith Bay came out of the sea. The cook handed over a piece of flatbread and allowed that answer to stand for itself.

Nearby, a service droid displayed freshly painted casing panels while their artist searched beneath a table for a missing brush. The droid turned slowly so visitors could see the decoration, then stopped whenever someone came too close to the wet paint.

A Pause at Kaelor

At the Kaelor Amphitheatre, the festival version of “Echoes of Peace” brought organic actors into the company’s established B-1 cast. The new closing scene followed people attempting to reopen a shared building after conflict, with disagreements over who could enter and whose account of its past should be heard.

The company had retained the fallen banner that caused trouble during rehearsal. Tonight it descended into a B-1 actor’s path as part of the performance. The droid halted; an organic actor moved to clear it, then waited for acknowledgement before crossing.

In rehearsal, the exchange had been surrounded by instructions and adjustments. Before an audience, the silence around it felt longer. The actor glanced back. The droid raised its head, registered the open route and stepped forward.

A few seats creaked. Somewhere behind me, a whispered conversation stopped.

The closing dialogue returned to the practical question of opening the building the following morning. Nobody on stage agreed about everything. They did agree who would bring the tools.

Applause arrived after a short hesitation, then gathered strength as the cast came forward. One B-1 bowed too early, straightened and tried again with the others. Its organic neighbour was still smiling when they left the stage.

Voices Under the Trees

Later, in the Reflection Gardens, the listening stations drew smaller groups. The adjustments made during sound checks held: each recording remained close to its bench, and visitors could move between accounts without hearing every voice at once.

A fishing crew’s recollection played beside a path where projected colours shifted around passing feet. Farther along, two visitors followed an enlarged transcript while a protocol droid waited through the recording’s final pause before offering another selection.

One older listener asked to hear a kitchen story again. On the second playing, she laughed before the recorded speaker reached the joke. Her companion watched her, then began laughing too.

The digital installations brought their own small surprises. A linked droid sent a band of pale colour across a projection as a visitor stepped forward; when she stopped to watch, the pattern slowed around her. Another visitor tried to repeat the movement and produced something quite different. They spent several minutes comparing attempts.

Questions about Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes still circulated during the evening. At the time of writing, no appearance had been confirmed. The local performers nevertheless found full audiences waiting for them, and plenty of people stayed to discover acts they had not known to look for.

When I returned to Grand Market Square, the opening ensemble’s instruments were being packed away. The cargo panel came down between two careful pairs of hands. Beneath it, a service droid collected the felt pads that had kept its stand from rattling.

A few children nearby were trying to clap the piece’s changing rhythm. They disagreed about where it turned. One began again, slower, and the others listened for their entrance.

I’ll see you in the square.