Sixteen tons of gold crossed the Sahara. One man had to count what it cost.

The history from the throne is famous. This is the view from the ledger.

Three parts, four interludes, one journey no one comes back from unchanged.

Between the chapters run four interludes in Aminata's voice, the treasury she held alone, the empire she kept breathing, and the count her husband never learned to read. Thirty years later, an old man dictates the whole of it to a young scribe, still unsure whether the journey was worth its price.

The people who carry it

• Sekou Kante, treasury architect of Mali, the man who counts everything and slowly learns what counting cannot hold.
• Mansa Musa, the king who would give away an empire's gold so a mapmaker in a country he will never see writes his name on Africa.
• Aminata, Sekou's wife, who runs the treasury alone for eighteen months and returns changed.
• Nandi Kouyate, the senior griot who warns Sekou the numbers are not the whole story.
• Al-Sahili, the exiled Andalusian poet-architect who builds Timbuktu's mosque and university out of mud brick.
• Ousmane, the young scribe who, thirty years on, takes down the account you are about to read.