The Maahes who walked the continent. Amina-Gao took the mantle in a quiet age, in a city on the great bend of the Niger. By then, the Pride had arms in the Sahel, the Swahili coast, the gold country of the south and the forest kingdoms of the west, and they had begun to drift apart. They kept their own customs, held their own councils and sometimes forgot that they were the same Pride.
She decided to remind them. In 1430, she set out on a journey that took her nine years: from Gao to the forest cities of the Niger delta, south and east to the kingdoms of the Congo basin, across the continent to the Swahili coast, and south to Great Zimbabwe. She stayed with every arm for a season. She taught the Roll, listened to the councils, and in every place she asked for the same promise: that if the continent were ever attacked, the arms would answer one another's calls.
She called the pact the Great Circuit. In 1450 she held a gathering at Gao, the first time every regional arm of the Pride had sat in a room together, and the pact was sealed. She held the mantle for 52 years, and when she died, the Circuit was the strongest thing the Pride had.
It would be needed sooner than she knew.
What she left behind: the Great Circuit, and the first gathering of every arm of the Pride.
