(urth) Short Stories 94 and 95: The Green Rabbit from S'Rian and The Choice of the Black Goddess

[Marc Aramini]

“The Green Rabbit from S'Rian” appeared in the shared world anthology
*Liavek* in 1985, and the sequel “The Choice of the Black Goddess” appeared
in its sequel *Liavek: The Players of Luck* in 1986. They are both
collected in *Storeys from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY:

The Green Rabbit from S’Rian

Captain Tev Noen decides to appeal to self interest to recruit a crew of
rowers for his ship serving the Levar of Liavek's Navy and is astonished at
the success of his second mate Dinnile in filling every available position
with Nomads from the Great Waste.

As they are about to leave, Noen is commissioned by an admiral to retrieve
a relic which has disappeared and might have gone to sea, a jade rabbit
reputed to contribute to luck, fertility, and wealth which has been stolen
from a wealthy jeweler named Serkosh in the city. Two of his crew, Syb and
Su, want to go aground after being paid so they can give money to their
families, who survive by fishing but live in poverty.

Noen's first mate, Oeuni, spots the trireme *Zhironni* they are after with
its mast raised, and they engage it in combat. The magician has not had
time to raise a wind to make it sail, but creates illusions such as a sea
serpent to dissuade Noen's *Windsong* from attacking. Windsong attacks
using its culverin named Poltergeist and rams the other vessel, at which
point Noen is able to board the hold and find the Green Rabbit. A female
tempts him, saying they can rule an isle in the Sea of Luck or beyond
together, and then the leader of the Nomads, Myllikesh, enters and tries to
take the Green Rabbit so that he can return as ruler of a land of
prosperity – for one has only to throw down the rabbit to create fecundity.
The female attempts to seduce him, and succeeds in stabbing him, at which
point Noen knocks her unconscious and the illusion dissipates - she is
revealed to be an elderly male illusionist. In the struggle, the Green
Rabbit falls into the sea and runs away, and Myllikesh dies believing the
rabbit was wasted. Noen knows that it will bring prosperity to the
fishermen in the area, fulfilling the dreams of Syb and Su. When he
returns, he speculates how rich the sale of the *Zhironni* will make him.
His first mate is in his cabin, her arm bandaged, wishing to tell him how
brave she was in the battle, and reassuring him of his own bravery as she
kisses him.

“The Choice of the Black Goddess”

Haunted by the loss of first mate Oeuni's hand through infection when the
injury from the first story was not treated in time, Noen has also lost any
profit from capturing the enemy ship in the first story, which was returned
to the Ka Zhir because Liavek is not currently at war with them. The
*Windsong* is leaking after being damaged in a magical storm (produced by
the villain of the story), and spots a distress flag on a ship flying the
colors of Liavek. The ship is becalmed in a bay with a small island and a
larger coast. After insuring that the water is deep enough for the
*Windsong*, they approach and spot a building in the distant forest. They
also see a large tower with artillery on the coast, so Noen takes a small
crew ashore. While he is in transit, he watches a black bird land on the
*Windsong*.

There, they encounter an acting troupe whose current leader, Baldy, is
serving as stage magician to maintain the illusion of the tower that Noen
and his crew saw earlier, though it is just a prop. He explains that the
ship they were traveling on was losing one crew member a day mysteriously
when a storm forced them aground. The captain and his two crew members went
to investigate the building Noen also saw through the forest, leaving the
acting troupe behind. Two of the actors are Nordread and Marin Monns, who
indicates that he is in fact the leading woman of the troupe and only
dresses as a man. Baldy tells Noen that somehow their normal stage magician
Xobbas has become three magicians, probably impostors, and that the real
troupe leader is missing.

Later that night, one of Noen's crew brings in a sailor who claims to have
been hidden on the becalmed ship they found in the harbor, but soon enough
Noen and Oeuni realize he is a “woman”, or at the very least not a sailor.
It is Marin once again, and Marin indicates that it seems that all of the
magicians are fakes, as the real Xobbas was an elderly, kind, and somewhat
naturally self-pitying man, and these ones are alternately cruel,
frightened, or just too mobile to be the elderly man. Oeuni reveals to Noen
that she found a fresh grave marked with an X where she believes the wizard
Xobbas was buried.

Noen decides to go up to the building and follow the missing captain and
crew. The troupe comes as well, interested in the fate of their real
leader, Amail Destrop. When they finally arrive at the temple, a nomad
still working for Noen reads the Tichenese writing, which says “The Black
Warrior Woman, Precious Helper of Men”. The vines have been cleared away so
someone could read it in its entirety, and a trail of ants leads them to
the fate of the captain of the becalmed vessel and his two remaining crew
members: skulls which have been desecrated so that the brains have been
extracted or eaten. Inside, a huge shah board, a game like chess, sits on
the floor, with only a large piece, the black sultana, remaining.

Seeing the symbols on the floor, they decide to place their members on the
appropriate chess spaces to fill up the board. Oeuni and Noen will control
the Black and White sides, respectively. After placing the crew and actors
on the board, they realize they need four wizards. Baldy takes one
position, and Noen realizes they need three more wizards. One of the Xobbas
imitators appears (Amail Destrop in disguise) and stands upon a space. They
notice that a third, silent wizard has also appeared, smaller than the
second but dressed in the same fashion. Finally, a fourth materializes (the
villainous Pardoner who probably stowed on the becalmed ship in the hopes
of pillaging this temple and who killed Xobbas), rubbing his hands in
anticipation.

They are trapped in their respective spaces on the boards. The silent
wizard only says, “It would be better, perhaps, if you were not to ask to
know too much,” then the statue of the sultana begins to rock like a
pendulum and moves, revealing a space beneath it. A dark thing from
overhead (Kakos, a demon kept by the pardoner) swoops down into the hole,
and Oeuni runs forward to confront it. Her hooked hand emerges with an
emerald necklace, her right hand full of gold, but the crowned demon grabs
her hand and pulls her downward – she digs her hook in to keep from being
pulled into the pit. A black slab from the wall seals the pit as the large
sultana disappears into a far wall, going through it as if it was
nonexistent. Noen tries to free Oeuni but cannot, even breaking his sword
on the demon's arm.

The fourth wizard gloats that they will all die and admits that the demon
is his. The black sultana reappears from the other side of the board and
crushes the wizard “to a broken doll whose crimson blood splattered … The
black statue had reentered its own temple through the door like the
figurehead of a galley that flies before a glae, and it had struck him like
that galley's ram”. The demon's arm is severed as the slab falls into
place. Here Noen notices that Oeuni's hooked hand seems to have switched
sides, and she whispers, “I had to choose. Lose my other hand, or the demon
would have killed you and Dinnile and everybody. It wouldn't have killed me
– it told me that.” Baldy notices that the remains of the hook is merely a
prop – Oeuni has regained her hand after making the choice put to her by
the Black Goddess.

Amail Destrop reveals that he found the corpse of Xobbas and disguised
himself as the wizard to try to find whoever killed him. His wife,
Nordread, has been dressed as a man the entire time, but abandons her
disguise here. The third wizard has disappeared, save for a single black
feather resting upon the wizard's space in the shah board, and they
speculate that the villain was a Pardoner who sacrificed the crew of the
ship daily to his demon, who required one sacrifice a day, but saved the
troupe in order to play the requisite game of shah in the temple and
plunder the Black Goddess' treasures. Marin reveals himself to be a man,
and Oeuni leaves the emerald necklace on the statue of the Goddess.

COMMENTARY: Set in a shared world, the *Liavek *stories are standard
fantasies inspired by the success of *Thieves' World*, unlike most of
Wolfe’s other work up to this point. By and large, Wolfe stayed within the
guidelines established for the world in tales which were primarily
straightforward adventure stories, but there are still a few subtexts of
note, and by the end of the second story identity and gender ambiguity
definitely surfaces.

At first it seems that the Green Rabbit has in fact brought prosperity to
Tev Noen – granting him a crew to search for it (some of whom are still
present in the second story) and wealth in the form of a magnificent
captured ship, which, when sold, would entitle him to a quarter of profits.
Alas, we see this undercut by the second story completely, with the ship
returned to its nation of origin because Liavek and Ka Zhir are not
currently at war, and Noen left with no profit from his efforts.

Rather than emphasize the magic in the first story, the primary brunt of
Wolfe's specific research shows a naval battle with guns and sails. The
specific terms like luffing (steering so far to windward that the sail and
airflow are disrupted) and transforming the ship into something closer to a
xebec to ram the enemy are the most dense portions of “The Green Rabbit
from S’Rian”. This meticulous attention to nautical detail and the features
of the ship continues in the second story, flowing from the engineer's love
of detail and process.

There are a few seemingly throwaway lines such as “It was beyond belief.
Too good to be true. For a dizzy moment [Noen] wondered if it were his
birthday – could he have forgotten? No. Dinnile's perhaps. No. Or – of –
course – one of the nomads'. What better luck could the poor devil have
than seeing himself and all his friends fed and safe aboard the *Windsong*?
Or what worse?” The rules of Liavek’s magic system are based on birthing
hours and labor – on the anniversary of a mother’s labor, the individual
born has a significant portion of unusual luck. Magicians in Liavek can
harness this luck on their birthdays into an artifact or phylactery, which
then serves as the focus of their magical powers. The risk is death. The
Green Rabbit is one such artifact, designed to grant prosperity when it is
thrown down. It falls into the sea and brings to life the dreams of Syb and
Su, so that their fishing families can be prosperous.

The other salient feature of the *Liavek* shared world is that it is based
on gender equality. Wolfe almost plays fair here, especially since the
first mate, Oeuni, is seen to have eyes that never cry even when she loses
a hand and ultimately makes a choice which saves everyone. However, the
subtext of both stories actually manages to create some further thematic
confusion between the sexes which probably shouldn’t be ignored in an
analysis. It is almost as if the dissolving gender roles creates a kind of
uncertainty in identification, almost farcical by the end of the second
story.

Tev Noen, while effective and hands on as a captain, is plagued with almost
self-deprecating doubts and catches himself easily influenced and swayed by
female attention, even recognizing and agonizing over the fact that he
certainly gives his first mate Oeuni preferential consideration. This only
seems a slight, perhaps subliminal commentary on a setting which places
females on the front lines of battle, whether in a commissioned naval
vessel or on the field – constant consideration for Oeuni monopolizes his
thoughts: “Noen found that he was thinking of Oeuni drowned, helmetless,
the green sealight shining on her shaven head, arms and long legs tossed in
death’s parody of swimming. Oeuni whom he would never possess, drawn down
to the dark by her cuirass. Ler Oeuni lost.” Her final choice, to sacrifice
her other hand so that her crew and the thespians may live, grants
credibility to her presence in battle and as first mate – she is the hero
of the second story and is rewarded with a new hand.

Noen's inadequacies before women occurs throughout both stories, especially
as he loads his gun in front of a female crew member who is more
experienced with incendiary weaponry in the second story as his small
landing party approaches the island of the marooned thespians: “Eitha, the
cockswain of the jolly, had her gun loaded and ready long before Noen (only
too conscious of the eyes of the four men at the oars) had rammed a handful
of musket balls down the barrel of his own and fixed the match in the
serpentine.” Even at the conclusion of the first story, when the
duplicitous elderly male magician masquerading as a female casts her
attention on the nomad Myllikesh, Noen “was surprised at the pain that gave
him.”

Noen is definitely susceptible to the charms of women, but there is some
latent sexism inherent in some of his thoughts, as he says of the actually
male Marin Monns, “I don’t know why, but I like her.”

The first story quotes Shakespeare’s Henry VII in its presentation of
gunpowder as “villainous saltpeter” – Shakespearean plays were famous for
this kind of cross dressing, and the thespian troupe in the second story is
no different.

When Noen first arrives at the shore and comes upon the group of actors, he
is shocked when “the white plumed disputant” in “a very masculine coat”
kicks aside her sword to curtsy and proclaim herself the leading woman.
Noen even mentally challenges Marin's gender: “The ‘leading woman’ sighed.
(Noen decided the second disputant was a woman, though a woman as tall as
he).” Later Marin disguises himself as a sailor as well, and even his
blushes are contrived. Yet beneath that … Marin is a man pretending to be a
woman playing a man, while Nordread, the other disputant, is actually a
woman who deceives him completely in her masculine disguise, and Noen never
thinks twice about her. This gender confusion is disconcerting and
ubiquitous, and one cannot help but wonder how much of this is simply
thespian and nautical tradition and how much an authorial commentary on a
setting established with more or less absolute equality between genders. If
Marin were not a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man, I
might say that the commentary was perhaps subconscious, but that level of
imitation speaks of something a bit more intentional.

There is little other ambiguity in the tales save for the apparent murder
but subsequent duplicate (or triplicate) presence of Xobbas the troupe
wizard, famous for disguising himself, and the identity of the third wizard
to appear in the game of Shah. Fortunately, there are really only two
options for his identity – he is either the spirit of Xobbas or the goddess
herself in disguise, and the text of course hints that the goddess is
probably responsible for bringing Xobbas back for one scene. The fate of
the original crew of the *Lady of Liavek* is fairly straightforward –
sacrificed to the demon Kakos by the Pardoner who killed and tried to
replace Xobbas.

When Noen is heading to the island, he spies a bird “as black as any crow,
yet lovely with its long wings and tail and its elaborately ruffled head:
not a carrion bird, Noen though, nor even a predatory one, though he was no
student of such things.” It settles on his ship, and he remarks, “Smaller
with its wings folded.” Later, the depiction of the goddess shows her helm
with the wings of a bird, and this feather is left behind in the place of
the third wizard to appear on the Shah board. For this reason, we know that
she has been acting throughout the story and has perhaps even aided Noen
and the troupe by returning Xobbas to the board for one final move.

NAMES AND SETTING DETAILS

While most of the names seem to be standard fantasy world inventions, some
of them have real world meaning – Marin Monns, for example, could mean sea
mountain or even a mount of Mars, of which the most prominent is Mount
Olympus, named after the home of the Greek Gods.

The demon of the pardoner, Kakos, has a Greek name which means “inner
malice” or “rotten”, “poisoned”, and this is certainly an intentional
naming.

Below are some background details from the appendix in the first *Liavek*
anthology.

The Kil which are mentioned briefly in both stories are another part of the
Liavek setting as a vague threat on the sea, possibly climbing up the side
of ships, and at one point Noen asks if they are responsible for the
missing crew members in “Choice of the Black Goddess” – they are mammalian
sea folk who can breed with humans.

The Pardoner who serves as the villain in the second story is a member of
“a sect of mendicant priests who will intercede with any god on anyone's
behalf … most people like them but consider them a little crazy … they are
the jacks of all-trades of the preisthoods, and often come from those who
left or were cast out of other faiths.”

The Black Faith, also called the Kin of One Path, believe in absolute
goodness and is primarily monastic in nature. Whether the Black Goddess is
related to the Black Faith or not is ambiguous.

S'Rian was an older town on the hills overlooking Liavek, conquered and
mostly destroyed long ago.

Ka Zhir is the large trading city across the Sea of Luck from Liavek, and
Liavek won a recent war against them.

Tichen is a large expansive nation with a strong army and weak Navy.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Does the bird which lands on the Windsong represent the Black Goddess
taking an interest in Noen and his crew, specifically Oeuni? The feather
that is left behind after the shah game definitely seems to be the symbol
of the Goddess, but the quote about cylindrical shah seems to invoke the
idea of a cyclical existence outside the standard board (ie – the return of
a piece after death) - “you pretend the board's a cylinder, that it wraps
around the whole world, so to speak. Then a piece that goes off one side
diagonally appears in the net row on the other … You see, while we thought
we were playing conventional shah, the gods were playing cylindrical shah.
I think there's a message there, though I'm not sure I know what it means.”

With all the cross dressing going on, can we expect to see the Black
Goddess manifest as a man? This and the feather point towards her as the
third wizard on the shah board ( her crest is “a bird with outspread
wings”), but the talk of cylindrical shah and its message probably
contributes to a reading in which Xobbas has been returned to the board for
a brief time by the Black Goddess.

CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS:

I feel that these stories are distinct from just about everything Wolfe has
written in that they are classifiable as standard commercial fantasy, and,
insofar as there is a subtext, it seems to be one on gender and leadership
rather than on plot elements. *Pirate Freedom* shares the nautical setting
and perhaps *Wizard Knight* is Wolfe's closest return to the fantasy
setting, though his inclusion in the* Liavek* project, according to the
creators of the setting, was based on *Book of the New Sun* and its fantasy
feel.
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