"You may not go there"

[dorchadas]

I have the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy on the top of my re-read list--it's one of my favorite fantasy series, and while it doesn't really have much cultural cachet, it should--and just today I was remembering one of my favorite passages, when the hero Simon is in the Sithi (elven, basically) city of Jao é-Tinukai'i.

"I am sorry. You may not go there."

Simon whirled to see a Sitha-woman standing on the hilltop behind him. For a moment he thought it was Aditu. This one wore a wisp of cloth around her loins and nothing else. Her skin was red-golden in the slanting sunlight.

"What... ?"

"You may not go there." She spoke his mortal tongue carefully. There was no ill humor on her face. "I am sorry, but you may not." She took a step forward and looked at him curiously. "You are the Sudhoda'ya who saved Jiriki."

"So? Who are you?" he asked sullenly. He didn't want to look at her breasts, her slim but well-muscled legs, but it was nearly impossible not to. He felt himself growing angry.

"My mother named me Maye'sa," she said, making each word too precisely, as if Simon's language were a trick she had learned but never before performed. Her white hair was streaked with gold and black. Staring at her long, coiled tresses--a safe place to let his eyes rest--Simon suddenly realized that all the Sitha had white hair, that the myriad of different rainbow colors that made them seem like outlandish birds were just dyes. Even Jiriki, with his odd, heather-flower shade--dyes! Artifice! Just like the harlot-women that Father Dreosan had ranted about during his sermons in the Hayholt chapel! Simon felt his anger deepening. He turned his back on the Sitha-woman and started downward into the valley.

"Come back, Seoman Snowlock," she called. "That is the Year-Dancing Grove. You may not go there."

"Stop me," he growled. Maybe she would put an arrow in his back. He had seen Aditu's terrifying facility with a bow just a few mornings before, when Jiriki's sister had put four arrows side by side into a tree limb at fifty paces. He had little doubt that others of her sex were just as competent, but at this moment he cared little. "Kill me if you want to," he added, then wondered if such a remark might strain his luck.

Half-hunching his shoulders, he strode down the slope into the whispering birches. No arrow came, so he risked a backward look. The one called Maye'sa still stood where he had left her. Her thin face seemed puzzled.

He began to run down the hillside, past row after row of white, papery-barked trunks. After a moment, he noticed that the slope was leveling off. When he found himself beginning to run uphill he stopped, then walked until he found a spot from which he could look about and discover where he was. The entirety of the great bowl still lay beneath him, but he had somehow moved around the valley's rim from the spot where the Sitha-woman stood, watching.

Swearing in fury, he started down the slope once more, but experienced the same feeling of leveling, swiftly followed by the resumption of an upward slant. He had gotten no closer to the bottom--he was still, as far as he could tell, only a third of the way through the ring of birch trees.

Attempts to turn away from the uphill slope also met with failure. The wind sighed in the branches, the birch leaves rustled, and Simon felt himself struggling as though in a dream, making no headway despite all his exertions. At last, in a paroxysm of frustration, he closed his eyes and ran. His terror turned into a moment of heady exhilaration as he felt the ground sloping away beneath his feet. Tree branches slapped at his face, but some peculiar luck kept him from striking any of the hundreds of trunks that lay in the path of his headlong flight.

When he stopped and opened his eyes, he was back at the top of the hillside once more. Maye'sa stood before him, her gauzy bit of skirt fluttering in the restless breeze.

"I told you, you may not go into the Year-Dancing Grove," she said, explaining a painful truth to a child. "Did you think you could?" Stretching her sinuous neck, she shook her head. Her eyes were wide, inquisitive. "Strange creature."

She vanished back down the hillside toward Jao é-Tinukai'i. A few moments later, Simon followed. Head down, watching his boot toes scuffing through the grass, he soon found himself standing on the path before Jiriki's house. Evening was coming on and the crickets were singing by the river-pond.

I love that. The way that they're both speaking the same words and drawing completely different meanings from them. "You may not go there"--Simon assumes it's a rule that he's being bound by, but it's not. It's more like a physical law.

I reused this scene in my long-running Exalted game, when the Lunar Endless Chase (played by sephimb) was planning to invade the citadel of the Deathlord The Walker in Darkness to steal the monstrance (think phylactery) of his Abyssal lover The Reflection of Their Glory Undimmed. It even played out exactly the same way. Endless Chase suggested sneaking in, and Glory told him that, "The living may not enter the Ebon Spires of Pyrron." Endless Chase got angry, thinking that she was still somehow loyal to the Walker and trying to enforce one of his edicts, but she said, "You don't understand. The living may not enter the Ebon Spires of Pyrron" and clarified there was an ancient curse that would kill anything living that entered. Then they went on a quest for some way for Endless Chase to be dead for a while so that Glory could sneak him in.

They got caught, of course, and that led to a pitched battle that resulted in Endless Chase sacrificing himself to kill the Walker in Darkness and save his love.

One of my fondest memories of that game.