Hercules and the Geek of Greece Read Online Free PDF Page A

of wizards. How could they best prevent the special warriors from Zim from reaching Castletop?
    â€œWe can make their journey here most miserable,” one of the wizards was telling Stuka. “We can make the trip so painful, they will probably turn around and run back home before they’ve even made it halfway!”
    Stuka listened closely to her wizards. She didn’t always believe what they said, but she knew they could do some amazing things.
    â€œHow would you accomplish that?” she asked, biting off a huge mouthful of meat from the cow’s leg.
    â€œWe can make the forest even more haunted than it already is,” one wizard told her. “We can conjure up very scary things—ghosts, horror plants, demons. Things that will make even the bravest soldier run away.”
    â€œThat’s good,” Stuka told them between bites of a cow’s eyeball. “What else?”
    â€œWe can do simple things like block the road, too,” another wizard said. “With one enchantment, we can put so many rocks and tree trunks across the road, it will take an entire army days to remove them.”
    â€œAgain, very good!” Stuka said, wiping her greasy mouth with her greasy hand.
    â€œAnd then, of course,” a third wizard whispered in her ear, “we always have our secret weapon. . . .”
    Stuka thought about that for a moment—and smiled. Yes, they had their own secret weapon, something more frightening than haunted forests and roadblocks.
    She took a huge gulp of wine and suddenly felt much, much better.
    Let Xumonia send her special warriors to get back the crown.
    With everything that would stand in their way, the chances of their success would be less than zero.

Chapter 5
The First Test
    Hercules had traveled the Road of Rudes before.
    As a boy he’d journeyed all over the realm and he’d used the road to get to many of these places.
    His memories of the road were mostly fond ones—long rolling valleys, pleasant hills, trees and flowers everywhere.
    But the road went many places in many directions, and the piece of it that connected Zim to Zum went through some of the darkest, most forbidding regions in the world. Again, Hercules knew that the quicker he made this journey, the better.
    He’d decided early on simply to ignore Geekus—maybe that way he would get the hint and turn around and go back to Zim, where he’d be infinitely safer. The queen might not be as mad as she would be if Hercules simply told Geekus to go home—or moved so fast that Geekus could just never keep up.
    Still, through the first six hours of the trip, they had been forced to stop no less than ten times, all of them because some small calamity had befallen Geekus. He’d dropped his eyeglasses three times, had lost one of his ugly sandals four times. He’d sneezed so loud once that it knocked him off his feet and startled XL to the point of bolting, and he’d simply tripped over his own feet twice.
    So those first few hours were not very pleasant. Sure, the road was level and the woods airy. It was an unusually warm spring day, and Hercules would have at least liked to enjoy the sun on his face. But Geekus was like an anchor, constantly dragging them to a stop whenever they got a good speed up.
    Hercules knew this was not a good situation, especially since he had such little time to get to Castletop.
    Even XL seemed to be upset at the boy. But he also made sure he never went too fast for Geekus. Whenever he sensed that the boy was falling behind, he would slow down and allow him to catch up. XL was a smart horse. He knew it was up to him to protect Geekus as well.
    The day wore on, and by the time noon had arrived, Hercules determined that they’d already traveled a good portion of the trip, despite Geekus’s dallying. Maybe they
could
make the Kingdom of Zum in just a couple of days, Hercules thought, and somehow get the crown back and returned