The Griot's Shadow

The Griot's Shadow

(sometimes called The Woman Who Walked With the Griot)

He was a tall man of the Mende marvels, narrow-waisted and long-boned, with features sharpened by travel and a gaze that rarely rested where others stood. His voice carried the burnished grain of old wood struck cleanly, and when he spoke, people felt that something had been set in place inside them.

He was a griot sworn not to lineage but to continuity.

From boyhood, his oath had been clear. He would not marry. He would not settle. He would not root himself in any hearth that could not move. His commitments were heavier than any household could bear. Memory required motion. Records demanded solitude. New learning needed to be inoculated carefully into old structures so it did not rot them from within.

He belonged to the work, to the reader, to the records yet unborn.

His sleep was a studio. Even in rest, he compiled. He consolidated. He folded song into sequence, sequence into chant, chant into structure. His mind built mbàrú of memory, houses within houses, storing kings, famines, treaties, errors, corrections. When he slept poorly, it was because a chronology had slipped and demanded repair.

He first came to her town when she was young. Too young to be noticed. Old enough to remember.

Tenacity's Disciple

She watched him from the edge of the gathering, tall already, awkward in her limbs, transfixed by the way his voice bent time. She did not understand what he was saying, only that when he finished, the elders sat differently, as if their backs had accepted a weight they had long been missing.

She followed him when he left.

At first, he noticed and sent her away. Firmly. Sometimes sharply. This was not a life for attachment. Roads were unkind. Men were unkind. Memory was jealous. She returned anyway, appearing again days later at a distance he could not account for.

Eventually, he stopped chasing her.

But for a long time, he did not speak to her.

She learned to follow correctly. Not close enough to be seen. Not far enough to be lost. She learned the rhythms of his walking, the pauses where he checked for water, the way he angled his body when danger passed through an area. He learned her silhouette without turning.

When he bought food, he bought more than he needed. When he found shelter, he chose places that could hold two shadows without comment. When paths split and one grew dangerous, he slowed just enough to ensure she took the safer one before he continued.

They never named this arrangement. Naming would have changed it.

She became, in all ways that mattered, his wife. And in all ways that mattered more, she was not.

Love Outside Love

Sometimes, after days of grief-heavy work, after recording the death of a good king too early, or the collapse of a lineage that should have held, his exhaustion would deepen into something rare. A true sleep. Sweet, unguarded, almost childlike.

Once, he woke at the precise instant before waking.

In that narrow space, he felt warmth. A steadying pressure. The unmistakable curve of a body that knew his without learning it. Then his breath shifted, and the warmth vanished, leaving only the echo of having been held.

Another time, his body knew before his mind did. The night was cold. His muscles unclenched against his will. He pretended, as he always did, not to notice. He accepted the comfort the way one accepts a blessing that cannot be repaid.

She never stayed once he crossed fully into consciousness. She did not want thanks. She did not want permission. She wanted only to ensure that he could continue.

His apprentices, after all, were not born of his loins. They were made. Forged. Taught. Memory did not require heirs of blood. It required carriers of strength. On the nights when sorrow pressed too heavily, he took the strength she gave and rose the next morning able to speak again.

Each Faithful

Years passed like this. Not together. Not apart.

People assumed many things. Some said she was a servant. Some said she was a burden. Some said she was mad. None of them saw what passed between the almosts. The moments that never became claims. The love that refused to interrupt duty, and therefore endured.

In time, she aged into herself. Her stride lengthened. Her silence deepened. He grew greyer, slower to anger, more careful with his voice. The distance between them never closed, but it never widened either.

When he died, it was on the road, as he had always known it would be. The apprentices wept. The records were secured. The chants were completed.

No one saw the woman who stood beyond the trees, upright, unspectacular, and entirely finished with following.

She did not cry. She had already grieved every version of him she had never been allowed to have.

What she carried was not loss. It was completion.

Some stories are about what is taken.
This one is about what is never claimed, and therefore never broken.