Chapter 18. Dawn of cacao in Mesoamerica

Where cities flourish and die, trade routes are forged, and an Italian explorer beholds strange brown seeds

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.

For several moments, Itzel and Max stood in silence, not daring to speak. They were about to undertake something they were neither authorized nor fully prepared to do, but the impulse driving them forward was too primal to resist.

Itzel tipped the little bottle over the cacao pod. Drops of sacred water beaded out over the rounded glass lip and fell splintered by the moon’s light into a shower of miniature crystals onto the rugged yellow surface of the pod. Luna lifted off the cacao pod and hovered, high-speed wings slicing through sacred water mist and moonbeams.

Closing her eyes, Itzel began to recite an Itzà invocation for the preservation of life and biodiversity, one of two sacred invocations she had been learning from her grandfather. Max watched quietly. He’d grown quite fond of the concept of sacred things, of things so numinous and pure that nothing else mattered.

Just then, a soft pop. Itzel opened her eyes. A tiny crack had opened up in the pod where the sacred water had first fallen. Barely audible, the crack grew lengthwise and widened, opening up the tough skin of the pod as if it were butter. As Itzel, Max and Luna watched, a luminescent pollen-like dust began to emanate from the pod.

Max and Itzel gasped in stunned unison.

The cacao dust swirled through the moonlight, shimmering white gold. But instead of slowly falling as dust particles are supposed to do, it swirled as if of its own accord, tracing lines against the night sky, lines that opened and multiplied into more lines, then clusters and shapes, and, incredibly, what looked like images. Max squinted against the sky to try and make out what the images were.

“It looks like a map,” he said in amazement. Indeed, a translucent map hung in mid-air right in front of them: a map of a region of the world rather familiar to Itzel.