Sijilmasa

The caravans arriving dusty and depleted from the long crossing of the Sahara, laden with salt slabs cut from the mines at Taghaza far to the north, and departing weeks later laden instead with gold dust and gold nuggets drawn from the alluvial deposits and mines of Bambuk and Bure, regions whose exact locations the Mali rulers guarded as carefully as any treasury.

Musa would have seen from his earliest years the Wangara traders, the Soninke and Malinke merchants whose networks stretched from the forest edges in the south to the desert's edge in the north, men who spoke of Djenné and Timbuktu, of Oualata and Sijilmasa, place names that mapped a world far larger than the compound of his birth.

He would have watched, perhaps from a respectful distance, as his father and uncles and the senior men of the court received these merchants, exchanging pleasantries in the ritualized, unhurried manner that Malinke custom demanded before any business could be discussed.

He would have seen the careful weighing of gold dust on small scales, the negotiation over the price of salt, a substance so valuable in the gold-producing south that it was, according to travelers' accounts that would later circulate through the Arab world, worth its weight in gold, or very nearly so.

It was in his third month upon the stool that he summoned Sankarın Mandi, the aging general who had commanded the royal cavalry since the days of Sundiata's own sons.

And Musa asked him plainly what the empire's borders truly were.

Not on the maps the Arab traders drew from hearsay in Sijilmasa or Marrakech, but in the reality of which villages paid tribute and which did not.

The old general, surprised by the directness of the question, spoke for the better part of an afternoon, and what he described troubled the young Mansa more than he let show upon his face.