The Maahes who left the river. Anbessa-Tsion was a highland watcher from a family that had guarded the road to the coast for generations, and Lakh-Ankh had met him in the last year of his life. He took the mantle at a time when the port of Adulis was the busiest harbour on the African side of the Red Sea, and he saw at once what that meant: ships from India, Arabia and the Mediterranean, all of them carrying things that the Children of Apep might hide inside.
He built the Red Sea Arm of the Pride, a house at Adulis hidden among the warehouses, with a watch on every dock and a courier boat that crossed the sea once a month. For the first time since Thebes, the Pride knew what the world was shipping to it.
He held the mantle for 61 years on a full supply of resin and trained two generations of coast watchers himself.
What he left behind: the Red Sea Arm at Adulis, and the habit of watching the harbour.
