The Maahes who crossed the sea. Zena-Dil was a sea-captain's daughter from the port of Adulis, and she was the first holder to treat the Red Sea as one country with two coastlines rather than a border between two worlds.
In her time, the far shore was a land of kingdoms at war, and a brood had settled into the confusion, feeding on persecutions and the troop movements that followed them. In the 520s, when the Aksumite king sent his fleet across to the far shore, Zena-Dil sailed with it. She did not fight for the king. She fought the brood that was hiding in his wake.
She spent twenty years on the far shore and the near one, crossing the sea more than forty times. She held a house on each coast and bound them with the Compact of the Two Shores, a pledge that the Pride would regard the Red Sea as a single field. She was killed in battle on the Arabian side in 549, at the end of the last great hunt of her life.
What she left behind: the Compact of the Two Shores, and the first Pride house outside Africa.
