Hostage: The Arbhal Series

The ARBHAL Sequence The tug of history, often very ancient history, is felt throughout these works. A large amount of information about the past is disclosed in the narrative (and a chronological tabulation is an appendix to ARBHAL), but for the purposes of these extracts a reader needs to know that long before the land was Arbhal it was Owan, and the Owanil, a gifted, energetic, but often arrogant people conquered and then lost a vast empire on both sides of Arnan, the inland sea. After some centuries of obscurity, during which their island-based priesthood, the Atarlum, was essential to the preservation of the Owani culture and language, the Owanil, through a series of opportune events, were able to regain control of their old realm, imposing themselves as an aristocracy on a numerically superior mixed population of Other Races (their own slighting term for all those without a pure Owani pedigree). Their old speech, however (the Owanilú), has become a scholar's language, surviving mainly for ceremonial and religious purposes, and in titles and proper names. Until relatively recently knowledge of the Owanilú was part of the elaborate system, Preference, by which the Owanil maintained control, practically excluding the Other Races from high office, and from many crafts and professions. For half an age these exclusions were a source of unrest and rebelliousness among the Other Races, while many Owanil came to view the system as incompatible with their people's historic love of justice. At the time when Dolvid begins, Preference has been abolished for the best part of a century; the exclusive Owani grasp of the realm's rewards has been loosened if not broken. With the extinction of the former reigning house even the rabhsai (the supreme, though by no means absolute ruler) has a Mixed strand in his ancestry, and a conciliatory Patriarch has moderated the Atarlum's dogmatic insistence on the natural superiority and special fitness to rule of the Owanil. Nevertheless, the old conflict is muted rather than permanently silenced. The much-intermarried provincial aristocracy still preserves the purity of its bloodlines, and the same is largely true with the landowning class of the Heartland ("the Families"). While, as mentioned elsewhere, Dolvid is essentially a novel about the childhood and early manhood of its title character, and Arbhal an epic adventure, the theme which runs right through the entire sequence is the desire (often the schemes) of this stubborn Owani minority, with the support (often the covert assistance) of reactionary elements within the Atarlum, to reestablish their former unchallenged dominance, and beyond that to somehow bring back the supposed glories of a legendary Owani past.