MERCANTILE: Tapo Meru/Sind

tapo meru

after days of nothing but hills of sand, the black trees appear on the horizon. 

they will always be the horizon. they are the highway of Tapo Meru.  

an orchard of gargantua speared deep into the sand.
the Arboretum Infelix.

a day-traveling caravan cools in the shadows of these trees
and discovers the illusion.

they were made by men out of many smaller sycamore, 
hard as iron, that long ago had been fished from the northern dams,
and dragged to the desert by slaves.

like fingers clasped together, 
the trees were tied with the fibers of a well known river stalk 
that came with the wood from the north, 
from the rivers of the city -- retted cooked and plaited to make rope strong enough to hold the trees together.

of these trees taller than the eight towers of Tapo Meru, 
(one for each dead king),

not even the ageless inside the city can satisfactorily explain how they were stood.

sind

Sind is the last settlement before the desert.

a trapezoidal hill before a river where once families of fishermen lived in mud huts.

when gold washed up with the commotion of these fishermens' nets, 

the casteless out of the lower depths of Tapo Meru crossed the desert on the prospects of merchants' stories:
of stars shining in the mud, 
a constellation of gold chinks.

these were the ones who made bricks from the mud, and walls from the brick.

these were the ones who named the hill Sind and the river Ket.

These were the ones who traded gold dust, and succored the caravans halfway to Tapo Meru

the hill grew crowded with walls and smithy holes and whore stews, 
and the river a sewer.

it was this way until a year an invader army lit the river afire, and tore down the town

and by the winter had built a balustrade out of the bones of monsters,

stodged up the Ket, and squatted there for one hundred years.

this exists in a library.

today the hill is what it always was.

an outcropping of limestone overlooking a lethargic brown wash south to the sea.

on the nights we rested there we shared our camp with other merchants bound for

Tapo Meru.

they shared their wine, and we held a contest of telling tales, 

the subject the ghosts just outside our fire.