The Maahes of the first Roman storm. Tamit-Ankh was a frontier guard from the northern border, raised in the shadow of the river's first cataract, and she took the mantle at the end of a century of peace. She would hold it for just 37 years, and she would spend the last three of them in a war.
When Rome took Egypt in 30 BCE, the northern frontier became the edge of an empire. Tamit-Ankh moved her seat to Syene, the border town, and spent years tracking a vampire court that had hidden in the confusion of the new border: tax collectors, soldiers, smugglers and middlemen, all of them watched by agents who were not what they seemed.
In 25 BCE, the Kushite queen's armies marched north against the Roman garrisons, and the Romans struck back, marching deep into the south. Tamit-Ankh knew what was coming. The Second Seat at Napata, the Pride's holy home for six centuries, stood in the invaders' path. She sent word to every watcher at Jebel Barkal, emptied the training house, and moved the Pride's people, its jars and its songs south to Meroë before the legion arrived.
Napata was sacked in 23 BCE. Not one watcher died in it. Tamit-Ankh herself stayed behind on the northern frontier to hold the river road, and she was killed in 22 BCE in a night fight against the court she had been hunting. The court died with her.
What she left behind: a Pride that survived the sack of its own holy city, and the memory of the empty training house.
