Most people abhorred work. The word ¨job¨ was bereft of any meaning and was only relevant for its ability to provide for life.
   As an anomaly to this attitude, Sona loved her job. The smell of warm leather, the creativity that became inveterate for Sona as she engraved sketches into her saddles, and the neverending blossoming of conversation was the most fulfilling thing Sona had ever experienced in her twenty-six years of life.
   The city of Gao didn't spare Sona from economic acrimony, though. Craftsmen and artisans glazed the city´s desolate terrain. Yet, Sona stood out. Even as a girl, her profits, counted in cowrie shells, aggrandized anything the older leathermen would bring home. While her charisma and earnestness towards her customers could be credited as a justification for this phenomenon, Sona´s marketing of her camel saddles was inevitably why her products were considered the most lucrative in town. 
   North African and Arab merchants visiting the city for commercial prosperity, as well as local Malians, expressed their adherence to Sona's camel saddles. Over the years, she had mastered the formalities of this art. The wooden framework was solid, strapping the leather in place to combat the brusque but brutal desert winds. They could hold up to six hundred pounds of materials and resources, making transportation efficacious, effective and fluid. 
   All of the traders would tell Sona the same thing:
   ¨Your saddles are secure. They are safe. They help my business survive,¨
   Out in treacherous Sub-Saharan terrain, survival meant everything. 
                        • • •
The zenith of dawn fought against the engulfing darkness of the night. The sun was barely out when Sona was down in the center of the city, setting up her camel saddles for the greatly anticipated profits of the day. Arab merchants from the Abbasid caliphate spoke of the animated spark of Baghdad: its markets, mosques and religious scholarship. Glancing around them and witnessing the prominence of Islam in the Malian city, the two men concluded that Islam had reached Gao faster than salt or gold. 
   Sona was quick to abate her stature and turn away from the men, pretending to be oblivious to their conversations. Sona tried to make it seem like she was apathetic to their words, yet she always listened. At all times and especially then, she was sure to listen.
   ¨Back home, Baghdad is just like this city. We see Persians, the Mediterraneans, almost more outsiders than our own people! They all used to just trade side by side but now they pray together too,¨ one of the men, arguably dressed as the affluent one, declared. 
   ¨Why shouldn´t they come? There is too much to offer her in Songhai. They have the finest ivory and many of them can be our slaves,¨ the man´s companion stated.
   Sona was swift to hide her eye-roll with the twirling of her back. All of these merchants spoke of the same cruelty, as if the desert wouldn't hear them.
   The men continued to converse and Sona had begun to wish they were murmuring instead. Within the gibberish emerged some wise talk, for which Sona was adamant to continue to hear into.
   The men described how their grandfather´s would travel to Ghana, not Mali, to trade. How the Ghanaians would once tax every commodity, like salt and gold, that would enter its borders. How this victorious kingdom would succumb to the fighting from other, neighboring empires. And how this fall would bring about the kingdom of Mali. 
   ¨It was Sundiata who made this possible, the King of Mali,¨ one of the men stated. 
   ¨Remember how he faced difficulty walking? How no one had faith in him? He reclaimed Mali in 1235 and gave this land a legacy,¨
   ¨Yes, how could I not honor this man? Then came Mansa Musa, may God bless him, who made a pilgrimage to Mecca and connected this Songhai Empire to the Muslim world, ¨ the other man responded.
   ¨Had he not taken that journey, maybe we wouldn´t be here today. His showcase of wealth as he showered the streets of Cairo with gold left us startled for decades. We wouldn´t come here to trade had we not heard about the wealth Mansa Musa held here!¨ 
   This rendition was not foreign to Sona. She had heard all about the history of her Songhai Kingdom, yet she felt as if she could never be turned mundane to these accounts. Her fascination with the rulers that had brought Gao, and her hometown of Timbuktu alive were always endearing. In a sense, every mention triggered an episode of nostalgia as Sona dwelled over her village in distant Timbuktu, and how the city she grew up in transformed into one of Islamic scholarship with surpluses of wealth so rapidly. Oh, how she missed those days. 
   But her past was a luxury Sona simply could not afford.
   The traders around her were busy whispering things she had already known. Sona´s fingers embraced a black pin that she selectively pushed into some of the saddles she had made. She was careful and precise to make sure that the two merchants in her vicinity would receive this pin. 
   This pin would determine who would survive the hustle, and who wouldn´t.
   For the world, Sona was just a saddlemaker. She was nothing more than a source for brief small talk and at most, one-sided gossip. For the decades of time behind her, Sona was something much more scandalous. 
   She was a spy.
   Her loyalty was etched into the ambitions of a shadowed network that would rage terror throughout the Trans-Saharan trade routes. 
   She stepped back, hoping to grasp a steady view of the men that would soon fall victim to her depravity. Oh, how only God could save them now.