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The Beklan Empire is the fictional kingdom in which Richard Adams' novels Shardik and Maia take place. The empire consists of 12 vassal provinces and independent domains organized around the central Beklan province, at the center of which is the empire's capital, Bekla. They include:
The capital is typically controlled by factions from one of the provinces, and the outermost provinces continuously threaten to break free.
A recurring theme in the empire is that of slavery and how it affects the health of a social system. The representative of slaves is the hero Deparioth, whose mother came alive from the Streels of Urtah and who spent his life in a fight for freedom from slavery both personal and institutional.
The lingua franca of the empire is the Beklan language. [1]