I was right, well-used weapons and suits of armour ended up piled onto each of us. It was uncomfortable, and slowed us down a little, but given we were already walking at the speeds of those in heavy armour, and none of us had had a full nights sleep, the difference was nearly negligible.
After an hour or so of walking, we took a quick break to grab some breakfast while Zahri prayed by the side of the road, the dawn light silhouetting her as she raised her head to the sky and murmured words. Despite everything that had happened, I didn't have an appetite, and only managed to choke down a couple of handfuls of trail mix.
After the praying, Zahri immediately burnt through all of her restored spells, healing up the wounds that were left on all of us. The feeling of the cuts closing up across my chest made me want to scratch at them, although I couldn't tell if the itching sensation was psychosomatic or not. I also couldn't reach under my armour to actually check on or scratch the itchy areas, so I just ended up awkwardly rubbing at my chest as we walked. This drew a couple of looks as I did so, but I couldn't work up the enthusiasm to care.
The journey had been done mostly in silence, at least where I was concerned. The others had a few short conversations on the way, but nothing that I really paid attention to. The walk itself felt weird for me, a sense of un-reality underlining everything, as if everything else was slightly less real than I was. A couple of times I had to resist the urge to swing my hand at a tree just to see if I'd go straight through it with no resistance.
The only way I noticed it was around noon when we ended up leaving the cover of the woods was the sun shining down on us, as it hadn't felt like that much time had passed at all. The forest broke somewhat abruptly into a clearing, with about 100 metres cleared between the woodland edge and the solid wooden walls of Turrford, taller and sturdier than the walls of the logging camp. They were thick enough to have archers standing on top of them, and as we stepped into sight, those same archers started moving and reacting to our presence. The road itself lead to a iron-banded gate, and around the edges of the walls, just on the edge of sight, was what looked like a river flowing into the town itself.
The final walk up to the gate was slow and obvious, although that wasn't that much of a change from the rest of the walk here, given the amount of shite we were carrying. My video-game instincts of 'loot everything and drag it back to sell' (although I guess they were technically Lidda's adventurer instincts, given she'd done the looting) had taken a knock at having to actually carry all of that shite, and I felt a brief pang of empathy for every rpg character I'd had that I'd forced to walk somewhere over-encumbered.
The gate swung open maybe 10 metres before we actually reached it, a couple of armoured figures rushing out of it. I felt myself draw in a breath without even thinking about it, the heat pooling in my throat before I made out what the lead one was saying as she approached.
"Julie! Zahri! You're back!" The woman was wearing the scalemail and spangenhelm combination that I was starting to think was the default equipment for guards around here, although she had a nasty looking bearded axe hanging at her side rather than the pikes the guards at the logging camp were using. "And successful, to boot, with everything that you're carrying." She made an obvious panning look of all of us and the shite we were carrying.
I'd never seen someone actually do a double-take in real life before. The guardswoman looked at me and the hefty bag I had slung over my shoulder, and had started to move on to look at Sabrina before whipping her head back around to stare at me. I just blankly met her gaze, completely out of anything resembling a fuck to give, and she span around to Julie and started talking quite quickly in a low voice.
"Subtle." I commented to Zahri next to me, who just shrugged in response.
"You're new. Interesting. Maybe dangerous. It's her job." My blank, unimpressed stare got a follow-up out of her. "Steph is also nosy." That made more sense, and while a small part of me was wondering what questions this 'Steph' was asking, given that Julie was frantically waving her arms in an emphatic 'no' way while shaking her head, I couldn't work up the energy required to properly care.
We were let into the town itself not that long afterwards, Steph the guardswoman extracting a promise from Julie to 'Tell her all about it later!'. From the inside, I could see that the walls themselves weren't actually thick enough to have people stand on them comfortably, although they were still a good 30 centimetres thick. Instead, the walls were braced with dirt and more wood, and then platforms were built on top of those braces, although there were some poles that were dedicated to just holding those platforms up. Said platforms were just low enough for the wall to cover the legs and lower torso of the people standing on them, providing a decent amount of cover from enemy archers.
I still didn't know exactly how dangerous it was to wander around in the wilderness, but given how fortified places seemed to be around here, it didn't seem like life was all that safe. Still, the townsfolk we wandered past seemed calm enough about everything. There were a lot more men walking around then there had been in the logging village (and a lot of women as well, most of whom stopped to stare at us), by which I meant there were any at all, and they didn't seem that scared or downtrodden, although I wasn't sure if that was a point towards the drow theory or not. A number of the guys we walked past were wearing skirts (and had shaved legs for some reason), and I had almost settled on my previous idea of this being fantasy Scotland before we reached the town's marketplace.
The marketplace itself was a number of stalls set up in the open area around the river that cut through the town, with the centrepiece being a large stone bridge over the river itself. The stalls themselves were selling a variety of things, food, drinks, clothing, other various knick-knacks and tchotchkes, but it was the various people at and on the stalls that caused me to mentally stutter.
The man in the dress caught my attention for a couple of seconds, but it was the topless woman that caused my brain to stop working for a little bit. She was unloading a cartload of some kind of produce, and her shirt was haphazardly tossed on top of the market stall as she moved sacks from the back of the cart to behind her stall, a layer of sweat glistening on her modest, but surprising perky breasts. I forced myself to drag my eyes away after a couple of seconds, although I couldn't help but take a second glance, just to make sure that I hadn't mistaken the situation. Nope, those were tits on display, and no one else seemed to think that was in any way unusual.
Right, let's think things through, I thought to myself, as I followed the others into an inn of some kind. It could just be that skirts and dresses were traditionally male garments around here, and that even made a certain amount of logical sense, given that if I were to consider which set of genitalia could get away with wearing something tight to the crotch, and which needed more space, I don't think I'd have put the trousers on the guys. It was possible that a certain level of casual nudity was accepted in this culture, as it was in a number of cultures around the world (well, my world at least).
But at the same time, I could already think up counter-arguments to my points. Trousers tended to be worn as they were more practical to actually do things in, so that left the implication that those wearing skirts and dresses weren't likely to need to do anything manual. And given the way that the others had reacted to my naked back and a glimpse of my naked sides, I could probably rule out casual nudity being a thing. And sure, those had their own responses, that maybe those men didn't need to work, despite not looking that rich and having gone to the effort of shaving their legs for some reason, that they were househusbands of some kind, and that maybe I was just supernaturally attractive enough to overcome a lack of a nudity taboo, but those ideas themselves led into the concept that was building up in my mind.
The idea that this whole matriarchal thing went a lot deeper than I had thought it had. I wasn't sure what the benefit of it was, so maybe it wasn't a deliberate thing that had been done by the drow (assuming that they were behind everything), and it had just happened incidentally as a result of other changes, but the differences went a lot deeper than the surface level.
I was already aware that a number of what I would have (maybe chauvinistically) thought of as traditionally 'male' jobs were being almost exclusively done by females (the loggers, the guards), but if the changes to gender roles were more significant than that, then suddenly a lot more of everything that had happened made sense. If I was taking what I would have culturally considered to be a female role, then the reactions of others, from the rape threat and that whole thing with the bandit, to the reactions of the others of me being shirtless, even to whatever those women that followed me out of the inn that first night (which was what, four days ago? Five days ago? It certainly seemed a lot longer) were saying.
A gauntleted hand waving in front of my face broke me out of my thoughts.
"You alright, Mahz? I asked you a question." I'd been following the others on autopilot as I thought, and we'd moved up to the bar counter of the inn that I'd been led to. While it was Julie that had broken me out of my thoughts, all four of the party, plus the heavyset man behind the counter, were looking at me.
"Yeah, I'm fine, just lost in my thoughts sorry. What was the question?"
"Why, I had simply mentioned that due to it being market day, most of our rooms here have been occupied, and we only have the one empty room left. Julie here was asking if sharing the room was fine with you, or if you'd prefer them to see if there were others who had a spare space and would be happy with them taking it." The overweight innkeeper (bartender?) delivered his words in a jovial tone, just quickly enough that I had to put effort into comprehending them, my brain taking a second to actually process what he'd said.
"What? No, yeah, that's fine with me, I don't mind." I was going over everything that had happened in the last few days to see if they made more sense with this new viewpoint of the world, where I was sleeping tonight was future me's problem.
Julie gave me a searching look, but shrugged and turned back to the guy behind the counter. A short conversation that I completely ignored later, he handed her an iron key, a huge bulky primitive thing with a grand total of three teeth. Leading us up a flight of stairs to a hallway full of doors, Julie put the key in an equally bulky and primitive looking lock, opening up a smallish room, complete with two dingy looking single beds and nothing else.
"Right, we should be fairly safe to leave our stuff here for the time being, Lo runs a tight house." Julie placed her bags on the floor and started taking off some of her armour as she spoke, leaving the breastplate on but removing the auxiliary pieces, such as her gauntlets and greaves. "I should head to the guardhouse, Myrna will want to an update, and I'll let her know about the bandits while I'm there as well. Lids, are you alright with dealing with all of the stuff we've picked up?"
"Yeah, Fran should be good for a fair amount of it, although given the state those bandits left some of their stuff in, we're not getting market value for any of their stuff. Would you mind helping me cart some of this stuff over to her, Zahri?"
Rather than immediately answering Lidda, Zahri took a moment out of taking off her armour to look at me before responding. "Maybe Sabrina?"
"Hmmm, why would I..." The wizard trailed off as she looked at me. "Ah, I see. If you think that's best."
I raised my eyebrows in response. "Is there a reason for that?" I wasn't sure if their occasional habit of talking around me and not to me was a sign of something (it'd probably be unfair to assume that it was a sexism thing, even if my thoughts about the matriarchy thing was right) or if I was making too much out of it, and it was only happening here due to me spacing out earlier, but at the very least I'd like to know why I apparently need Zahri to babysit me.
She looked mildly guilty for a moment, and then shrugged. "You have been somewhat distracted and not entirely compos mentis since even before out arrival into town today. Given that I need to purchase some replacement material components, as I mentioned earlier, it would make sense for Zahri to be the one to accompany you."
A part of me considered arguing that thought, but that would essentially be arguing for me to be on my own in a town where I didn't know anyone and where the culture seemed to be more different to what I'd have expected the more I looked at it, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour here.
"Fair enough. Thanks?" I hazarded towards Zahri, who just nodded from her T-posing position as Julie unbuckled her chestplate. "I guess I'll, I dunno, grab a drink then?" The chance to sit down and put my thoughts in order would be especially given how I'd been jumping from an apathetic feeling of calm to a hyperfixated focus and back.
The pair of us ended up at a table downstairs, the other three having wandered off, Lidda and Sabrina ladened down with bandit weapons and armour. The downstairs of the inn was mostly empty of people, only a couple of stragglers drinking alone in various corners, the innkeeper themselves, and the two of us. I'd bought myself and Zahri a mug of mead each (I didn't know if a silver piece a mug was a good price or not, but Zahri didn't complain, so I guess it couldn't have been too bad), and was nursing my drink probably less than I should have been as I got lost in my thoughts.
If I was right about the whole matriarchal thing having a deeper impact than I'd been expecting (I needed a snappier name for that. 'The drow approach to society' was tempting, but that would involve significantly more murder) then it would affect the way that I was being viewed, or would be viewed. The thought of adapting the way that I was acting to try and fit into the culture of this area crossed my mind, but I swiftly discarded it. Aside from the obvious problems of already having spent time around my party members, and a sudden change in my personality would no doubt confuse them, the fact that still didn't actually know all that much about this place, and therefore my attempt to blend in might equally backfire, the main reason I didn't want to do so was that I couldn't work up any enthusiasm to lie about myself in order to fit in with a bunch of strangers. Although the realisation that that was probably the most English I'd ever been, of completely refusing to adapt to a foreign culture that I was living in, did make me chuckle to myself as I raised the mug back up to my lips.
Only a couple of drops met me, the last remnants of the mead dribbling out, as I looked down at it and realised that I must have polished it off surprisingly quickly already. I looked over to Zahri, who was in the process of downing the rest of hers.
"Another?" I asked.
She put the now empty mug back down on the table, and looked at me. "You feeling alright?"
I took a moment. The alcohol had actually helped clear up my mind a little bit. Well, no, that was a lie, given that I hadn't eaten all day it had gone straight to my head, but it had fuzzied it up in a way that I was familiar with and used to, as opposed to the weird state I'd been in before. "Yeah, I think so. You?"
She nodded. "Fine. Sure you're alright?"
Not quite sure why she was pressing the point, but whatever. "I'm good, don't worry. I was thinking about another cup of mead, you want one?"
The large half-orc look down, put one arm on the table (I took the opportunity to admire her arm muscles in her short sleeved tunic, she was built) and rapped her fingers on the table, clearly considering something. She looked back up and locked eyes with me.
"Wanna have sex?" She asked.