A Caravan of Gold

In the year 724 of the Hijra, which the Christians far to the north called 1324, the Mansa of Mali decided to go to Mecca, and the whole world, it seemed to Mara, decided to go with him.

For a year the capital at Niani had been filling up. Men came in from every province of the empire, from the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure in the south-west, from the trading towns of the river, from Timbuktu and Gao in the east, with their households, their servants, their animals and their baggage. Camels arrived by the hundred from the desert edge, groaning and spitting and complaining in long lines down the red roads. The markets ran out of cloth, then leather, then rope. The smiths worked through the night. The town spilled out past its walls into a sprawl of tents and pens and cooking fires that went on as far as Mara could see from the top of the granary, and further.

Everyone had a number for the caravan, and every number was different. Eight thousand people. Twelve thousand. Sixty thousand, said the man who sold kola nuts at the north gate, who had never counted anything higher than his own debts. Camels beyond counting. And gold. Everyone agreed about the gold. More gold than anyone had ever carried anywhere, gold enough to make a road to Mecca, gold enough to buy Egypt, packed in leather sacks and loaded on camels and guarded by men with spears.

Mara had seen the Mansa himself only once, from a distance, at the great feast at the end of Ramadan, when he had sat beneath a silk canopy on a raised platform, under the shade of a parasol topped with a golden bird, with his commanders and his scholars and his griots ranged around him, and the whole of Niani had bowed and thrown dust on their heads, as was the custom. Mara had thrown dust with everyone else, and looked up through it, and seen a man of middle years in a robe of red and white, very still, listening to the griot recite the history of his ancestors. He had not looked like a man who owned more gold than anyone in the world. He had looked like a man who was thinking about something very far away.

Mecca, people said. He had been thinking about Mecca for years. About the obligation of every Muslim who could make the journey to make it once in a lifetime. About the holy places, and the scholars of Cairo and Medina, and the books. People said he wanted books more than anything. People said a great many things.

Mara had seen the gold, though.

That was the strange thing. Mara had been born in a village of round mud houses on a tributary of the river, the child of a family that grew millet and kept goats and had never in its history owned more gold than a single earring. And now Mara had stood in the Mansa's own storerooms, among the sacks.

It had happened because of a goat.

Two years ago, Mara's uncle had sent Mara to the capital to work for a cloth merchant, because Mara was quick with numbers and slow with a hoe, and the family had decided which was more useful. The cloth merchant sold to the palace. One morning, delivering bolts of indigo to the Mansa's stewards, Mara had watched a junior storekeeper count a herd of tribute goats into the royal pens, and get the number wrong, and get it wrong again, and begin to shout at the goats as if they were doing it on purpose.

The storekeeper was a big man, and the goats were small, and the Mansa's stewards were watching, and Mara should have kept quiet.

Mara said, before thinking, "Forty-three."

The storekeeper had turned round, purple. "What?"

"Forty-three," said Mara. "You keep counting the brown one with the white ear twice. It goes round the back of the others."

An old man standing in the shade of the storehouse doorway, a tall bony man in a plain grey robe with one eye clouded white, had laughed: a short, dry bark like a stick breaking. Then he had walked over, counted the goats himself, slowly, and nodded.

"Forty-three," he said. He had looked at Mara with his one good eye for a long, uncomfortable time. "Whose are you?"

That was Farba Kandia, the Mansa's chief quartermaster. By the end of the week, Mara was working for him.

And now, on a bright, cool morning in the dry season, with the whole of Niani humming like a disturbed hive and the first lines of camels already moving out through the north gate, Farba Kandia sent for Mara.

He was sitting on a stool in the shade of the treasury wall, with a tally board across his knees and a cup of millet beer untouched beside him, watching the camels go. He did not look up when Mara came. He never looked up. He said it saved time.

"The Mansa's caravan," he said, "will carry more gold than any caravan in the history of the world. It will cross the desert, and come to Egypt, and go on to the holy places, and come home again. It will take a year, perhaps more. Every grain of that gold must be counted, and guarded, and accounted for, every day, from here to Mecca and back." He tapped the tally board. "I am old. My eye is bad. I need a second pair of eyes. Young ones. Honest ones. Ones that can count goats." He looked up at last. "You."

Mara could not speak.

"Junior quartermaster," said Farba Kandia. "Second to me. You will ride with the gold string, and sleep beside the gold, and count it every evening, and if a single sack goes missing between here and the Red Sea, the Mansa will want to know why, and I will tell him it was your fault." He picked up the millet beer and drank it at last. "Do you accept?"

There was only one answer. There had only ever been one answer, from the moment a brown goat with a white ear had gone round the back of the herd.

"Yes, Farba," said Mara.

The old man looked at Mara for a moment longer, with his one good eye, and something in his lined face shifted very slightly, which might have been satisfaction, or might have been pity.

"You will hate it," he said. "The desert. The camels. The counting. The heat that makes the numbers swim. There will be nights you will wish you had stayed with your goats." He set down the cup. "And there will be one night, somewhere out there, when you will stand under more stars than you knew existed, beside more gold than you can imagine, and understand that you are part of something people will talk about for a thousand years." He shrugged. "That night is worth the rest. Mostly."

The old man held out the tally board. "Then go and count the camels. They are leaving without you. And Mara: count them twice."