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We’re shifting our focus to explore Mexico's eastern coast with twelve-year-old George Perez in the serialized novel: ISLA.
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(An excerpt from "Shadows and Echoes" a collection of interpreted Mayan legends)
Lady Blood
The calabash tree was close to death.
Its twisted, barren branches no longer paid mind—no longer fought against the gale that constantly whipped around it.
A tree, too, feels sadness in its final years, as its limbs grow heavy and succumb to moss. Birds no longer nest among its boughs, and the insects that once scurried up and down, tasting the sap, now divert around it—evading its touch, sensing the creeping demise from deep underground as the roots stop reaching for water.
And in its middle—the heartwood of the tree, the center of its essence—yearning ceases. It no longer seeks the sun, no longer turns its leaves toward any light.
Hope fails first.
Then despair freezes movement, as death slowly takes hold.
And so the calabash tree stood dormant, waiting for its end.
Until the ancients placed between its branches the severed head of Hun Hunahpu. A trophy from the underworld—a trick of spite—for failing the trials of Xibalba.
Where the other brother, Vucub Hunahpu, was killed and buried in shadowy nothingness, his twin continued to live—plotting a surreptitious revenge from the crook of the tree.
There, the remaining life of the brother seeped in, mixing with the last breath of the tree. And with a shock, the tree sprang back to life. Beneath the bark, the sap began to run—breaking through closed veins and rushing out to each branch, lifting them skyward. Blossoms formed where none had existed before. Fruit began to bear heavy on the limbs.
It was sweet—sticky and irresistible.
It was this fruit that drew the maiden, Xquic, also known as Lady Blood, to the tree.
She had been warned: the fruit was cursed, the tree was haunted. The elders said the sweetness masked a poison—that it was the skull of a dead man, and not fruit at all.
But the air around it shimmered with blossom-scent, and her body remembered something older than fear. She stepped closer. Her nose filled with the warmth of ripened fruit. Her hand lifted—hesitant, open.
And then—the skull of Hun Hunahpu, nestled among the fruit, spoke:
“Why do you reach for that which is forbidden?”
Xquic did not flinch.
Her gaze held the skull, steady and calm.
“I desire it,” she said. “Because I feel the breath of the old ones in its scent.”
The skull was silent for a long moment.
“Then stretch out your hand.”
She did. Without trembling. Without shame.
And the skull—dry and dead and full of power—spat into her palm.
She watched it land there, not as something unclean, but as something living. The spittle shimmered like dew, like memory.
She closed her hand around it, and the tree seemed to sigh.
After a moment, the skull spoke again: “This is my offering,” it said. “A trace of what I was. If it takes root in you, then I am not lost.”
Xquic watched as the fruit on the tree continued to bloom and swell and ripen—above her, and around her.
And inside her.
Her mind wandered, drawn into a sudden vision: a bright flash overhead—a sun and a moon shooting across the sky.
When he heard what she had done, her father howled, his face flushed with anger at the tree’s deception. Together, he and the lords of Xibalba sentenced Xquic to death.
The owls—winged death in form—were summoned to rip out her heart and bring it back, bloody and still beating, to be laid upon the great fire.
But Xquic was clever and composed. She knew the owls could be swayed by reason. She said to them, “My womb grows what no man has touched. What stirs within me is not sin, but communion—between spirit and root, between breath and memory. To kill me would be to destroy the essence of what we are.”
The owls listened. And agreed.
With their help, she escaped. To cover their defiance, they returned to the lords with a heart made of red tree sap. The scent of it, and the fire that raged, pleased the lords of Xibalba.
Hidden from their sight, Xquic gave birth.
Her twin boys were named Hunahpu and Xbalanque—and they would not stay hidden for long.
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Wow, man, this was amazing! Really, really great.
Love a good myth, and this is a good one.