The town smelled.
That was Marcus's first and most persistent impression as the guards led him through the main gate and onto the high street. It smelled in the specific, layered, committed way that suggested this was not a temporary situation but a long-standing civic policy. He didn't have a reference point for what a medieval town was supposed to smell like — his entire frame of reference for this period of human development was textbooks, films, and one very detailed strategy game he'd sunk two hundred hours into during his freshman year — but he was fairly confident that even by period-appropriate standards, this was a lot.
The main road, at least, was paved. Flat stones, unevenly laid but present, running from the gate toward the castle motte in the distance. The secondary roads branching off it were not paved. They were mud, comprehensively and enthusiastically, churned by feet and cart wheels and what Marcus chose not to examine too closely into a substance that was less a road surface and more a philosophical statement about the nature of infrastructure investment.
"Is this doing well?" he wondered, looking around. "Is this a thriving town? Is this a struggling town? What does a thriving medieval town even look like?"
He genuinely did not know. He had no baseline. For all he could tell, this could be the economic jewel of the entire region and he would have no way of identifying it, because his entire knowledge of pre-industrial urban economics was theoretical and none of it had prepared him for the smell.
Someone across the street screamed.
His hand moved before he could stop it — some instinct, some reflex — and then he processed what he was seeing, which was a woman leaning out of a second-story window screaming at someone below, who screamed back, and the guards around him did not react at all, not even a twitch, which told him this was simply ambient noise in this town, this was just what the town sounded like, screaming was a feature not a bug.
He put his hand back down.
From somewhere to his left came the distinctive sound of a fight — the meaty, ungainly sound of two people who were not trained fighters hitting each other with the commitment of people who had been drinking since the afternoon. He located the source: outside a low building that the sign above its door identified, through whatever linguistic inheritance had come with this body, as a tavern. Two men, large, red-faced, absolutely dedicated to their disagreement, swinging at each other with a cheerful lack of technique while a small crowd watched with what appeared to be genuine entertainment.
Marcus looked at the guards.
The guards were not looking at the fight. The guards were looking straight ahead, escorting the young lord home, which was apparently the priority, and the two drunks attempting to rearrange each other's faces outside the pub were simply not a concern worth redirecting attention toward.
"Right," Marcus thought. "Different era. Different policing philosophy. Fine."
It was not fine. It irritated him in a way that was disproportionate to the situation, the kind of irritation that came from a deep personal commitment to orderly systems and a low tolerance for preventable chaos. He breathed through it. He kept walking.
Then someone — somewhere, in a direction he couldn't immediately identify — emptied something from a window.
It hit the road approximately four feet to his left with a sound he would spend significant effort trying to forget.
The smell got worse.
"Oh no," Marcus thought.
He looked down at his boots. Clean. Good. He exhaled.
He kept walking.
He did not keep walking fast enough.
The second time it happened, it happened closer, and some of it — a very small amount, an objectively negligible quantity, an amount that should not have been possible to care about and yet — some of it landed on his right boot.
Marcus stopped walking.
The guard to his left — a younger one, barely twenty, who had the expression of a man watching something terrible happen in slow motion — made a sound that was almost a laugh before he caught it, strangled it, and converted it into a cough of heroic implausibility.
Marcus looked at him.
The guard looked straight ahead with the intensity of a man whose continued employment depended on his ability to find the middle distance extremely interesting.
Marcus looked back at his boot.
"Don't," he said quietly, to the guard who was now vibrating slightly with suppressed something. "Don't you dare."
"Young lord, I can have someone—"
"Keep walking," Marcus said. "We are not stopping for this. We are walking past this like it didn't happen."
"Of course, Young—"
"Like it didn't happen."
They kept walking.
People were staring at him.
He noticed it after the first minute and it didn't stop — eyes tracking him from doorways, from windows, from the sides of the road, children stopping to look, adults doing the more socially acceptable version of the same thing. He understood, academically, that a procession of guards escorting a visibly clean, visibly well-dressed young man through a town where most people were neither of those things was noteworthy. He understood it. That didn't mean the weight of all those eyes didn't do something unpleasant to the back of his neck.
"You're fine," he told himself. "You're with guards. You're—"
But they were poor. That was the thing he couldn't stop processing. Genuinely, comprehensively poor, in the specific way that wasn't just not wealthy but was the absence of sufficient resources for basic dignified existence. The clothing. The faces. The children in particular. He looked at the children and then looked away.
"Where does the tax money even come from," he thought. "What is the tax base here? What are the productive outputs of this settlement? Because if this is what the population looks like, the surplus generating capacity is basically nothing."
He stopped himself. Later. That was a later problem.
Something shifted in his peripheral vision — a figure in the crowd, the particular kind of stillness that stood out against ambient motion, eyes too fixed, too deliberate — and Marcus felt it before he understood it, the cold specific alertness of being assessed as a target.
His pace didn't change but his shoulders tightened. He ran it rapidly: twelve guards, none of whom were paying specific attention to the crowd, all focused on the path ahead, young lord, clean boots, expensive clothes—
A hand landed on his shoulder.
He did not jump. He was proud of this.
"You'll be alright, Young Lord."
The voice was older, roughened by decades of something, and Marcus turned to find a guard he hadn't paid particular attention to before — perhaps sixty, perhaps not yet fifty, impossible to tell because this world was apparently very hard on its people. A face like a topographical map of past difficulties. Grey at the temples, a scar running through one eyebrow, and a limp that Marcus had only now noticed because the man moved with the practiced unconscious compensation of someone who had been working around it for years.
He was looking at Marcus with an expression that was not quite fatherly and not quite professional but sat somewhere between them — the look of someone who had seen this particular fear in people before and knew what to say about it.
"I've walked this road for twenty years," the man said quietly. "Nothing will touch you while I'm on watch."
Marcus looked at him.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it, and looked away before the part of his brain cataloguing the man's combat limitations could say anything further.
The change happened gradually and then all at once.
Maybe two thirds of the way to the castle motte, the mud roads stopped being mud and started being something better — not paved, but graveled, maintained, the kind of surface that someone with resources had made a decision about. The buildings changed with the roads. Wider frontages, straighter walls, window shutters that fit their frames, a few with small ornamental details carved into the lintels — nothing extravagant, but the visual language of people who had enough surplus to think about something beyond subsistence.
"Merchants," Marcus thought. "Or local officials. Someone with actual standing."
He filed it. He kept filing everything, even though he didn't yet have a framework to put it in. Data first. Framework later. That was how you approached an unfamiliar system.
The gate mechanism was a problem.
He heard it before he saw it — the grinding, reluctant protest of iron that had not been properly maintained, the particular sound of a mechanism working against itself — and watched the gate drop approximately eighteen inches before shuddering to a stop, the teeth of the gear catching on something, the whole apparatus sitting there with the mechanical stubbornness of something that had been this way for long enough that everyone had simply adapted to it being this way.
The guards at the mechanism looked at each other. Then they looked at the gate. Then they looked at their hands, as if the solution might be located there.
Marcus watched this for approximately four seconds.
"The gear," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"There's dried mud packed into the gear mechanism. Clear it and try again."
A guard looked at the housing. Looked back at Marcus. Looked at the housing again.
"Yes, Young Lord."
A tool was produced. The mud was cleared. The gate descended with the smooth, unhurried inevitability of a mechanism doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Marcus stared at it.
"That gate," he thought, "has been broken for what looks like a very long time. It is a castle gate. The gate of a fortification whose entire purpose is to be defensible. And nobody — not one person — looked at the gear and thought to clean it."
He breathed.
"Fine," he told himself, in the tone of a man for whom it was very much not fine. "It's one gear. Standards are different here. This is fine."
He walked through the gate.
"I am going to fix everything in this castle," he thought, with the resigned certainty of a man who has just understood his own fate. "I am going to be absolutely insufferable about it."