Chapter 10. Cacao fit for a king

Where cacao is cacao, fire is sacred, and a jaguar is a lord

Note: Author commentary at the end of the chapter. This commentary is exclusive to the Cacao Muse; you won’t see it on Amazon, my author site, or printed inside the wrappers of my favorite chocolate bars.

That night, dinner tasted differently. For Max, it had been an explosive albeit bittersweet day of firsts: his first time in a cacao grove and the first time he tasted the fruit of the cacao tree; his first encounter with the mesmerizing Melipona beecheii and the first time he tasted their delicate honey; his first experience of a real Maya meliponario; and the first time he painted a honey trail on his own, in a Guatemalan rainforest no less. But all that evaporated like dew in the sun in contrast with the serpent. The silent, slit eyes of the barba amarilla burned in Max’s mind. The fresh, bright essence of the cacao pulp still permeated his senses; his skin recalled the soft pitter-patter of the Melipona bee’s feet and the microbreeze of her wings; but the enigmatic serpent electrified his entire being.

Then there was the lost bee hive. A large, beautiful hive of precious stingless bees the loss of which he’d been party to. He’d never witnessed the exodus of an entire hive before; the image of the swarm ballooning out from the fallen tree replayed in his mind. He tried not to think about how important these bees were to the Maya—and to his father’s research. A large lump of guilt sat in his gut. He looked over at Itzel’s table, resisting the urge to run over there and tell her what had happened. Now was not the time.

For Itzel, who’d eaten cacao pulp since she had teeth to chew with and who felt more at home in the forest than in her own house, it was a day she would hold forever in her heart, for it was the day Ah Muzen Cab spoke to her. For a human to try to communicate with bees and other forest inhabitants was as natural as the sun rising in the East, but for them to respond to—more striking still, to initiate communication with—a human being was a rare event. Indeed, it was the stuff of legends. A part of her yearned to share this extraordinary moment with her father, but another, deeper part of her soul called on her to enshroud it in sacred silence.

Neither Max nor Itzel spoke during dinner, for neither needed to. But they couldn’t stop looking at one another across their respective tables, long glances bursting with suggestion and meaning, stretched past their limits by the things they wanted to say to each other but hadn’t yet the adult vocabulary to express.