Part II
Chapter 5 Song-Bearer
Dakar flickers past — taxis, market smoke, griots with their lutes. I send Mrs H her update and keep moving.
Saint-Louis at night is velvet and brass. A thin man with a battered trumpet sizes me up and tells me the real stories live where women dance barefoot on the sand. Later I watch them at the water’s edge and believe him.
Near Kaolack, a griot in indigo commands a village fire with a single glance. She speaks of Lake Fundudzi — a child born speaking, carrying river and sky in her eyes — and her gaze finds me in the crowd with unsettling precision. Karim murmurs that everyone on this continent seems to know I’m pregnant. A woman presses soup into my hands and whispers: when you reach the hills, silence will speak.
The road south takes us through Tambacounda, across Mali, into Guinea. The Niger moves slow as a held breath. Jeliya drifts through café windows. Women in Ségou and Djenné tell me of rivers that birth spirits. My notebook fills. My belly tightens at odd intervals — the children registering each story as it’s filed away.
I can’t sleep. Karim snores. The fire is ash. I pull the Kaolack cloth around my shoulders and sit with what won’t settle — the wind moving in two directions, one voice saying north, go north, the other saying nothing, just opening.
I close my eyes. Dark water comes. A bruised sky. Constellations in alignments I almost recognise. The cloth tightens though there is no wind, and both children turn in their sleep at once.
I open my eyes. Embers. African stars.
But I know where I am going. And it has been calling me long before I arrive.
I.Ph.
Full chapter on Ream — https://reamstories.com/phaedrasfables/public
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