The Black Stallion and the Lost City Read Online Free PDF Page A

off.
    Xeena turned and waved. “Hey there,” she called.
    “Lovely night,” Alec said. “Not too cold.”
    Soon they were both gazing up at the stars, trying to identify the different constellations.
    “Do you believe in astrology, Alec?” Xeena said after a minute.
    Alec shrugged. “There might be something to it, but personally, no, not really. I don’t know much about it. Do you?”
    “My grandfather used to say our destiny is written in the stars. Popi believed some people could read omens and see prophecy in the night sky. He told me that there is a long history of fortune-telling in these mountains—at least there used to be.”
    Alec was about to say something but Xeena cut him off. “And he wasn’t some superstitious old fool either, just because he believed in astrology,” Xeena said defensively.
    “I wasn’t going to say that,” Alec said.
    “Popi was smart. He had a gift with languages—learned to speak English on his own. He was the onewho taught me. He was also a successful businessman, even though his family was poor when they came to the city. He worked hard, bought a restaurant, then another, then a house and an apartment building. When he disappeared, he was quite wealthy.”
    “He disappeared?”
    Xeena nodded. “One day he just sold everything, emptied his bank account and vanished. The police don’t know what happened to him. My father thinks some criminals may have tricked him out of his money and killed him.”
    “That’s awful,” Alec said.
    “I like to think he just wanted to run off and live by himself, maybe on an island somewhere. He was that type of person. In some ways he never really liked the city, and after my grandmother died …” Her voice trailed off.
    Alec gestured to the dark side of the mountain. “So nobody lives up there now, aside from the people in the resort?”
    Xeena nodded. “It’s always been sort of a touchy subject for our families,” she said. “No one even talks about the village we came from anymore. What I’ve learned, I had to find out for myself. Popi used to tell stories about his village that he’d heard as a little boy, stories about a secret horse cult that lived in the forest since ancient times, a cult that worshiped the Thraciangod king Diomedes at a secret temple hidden in the woods. Popi said they even claimed to guard the bloodline of a fabled breed of horse that counted Alexander’s stallion Bucephalus among its own.”
    “I thought Diomedes was a hero in the
Iliad,
” Alec said. “Or was it the
Odyssey
?”
    Xeena shook her head. “That was another Diomedes,” she said. “This Diomedes was anything but a hero.”
    Alec nodded. “I’ve heard about some of those horse cults living in other parts of Europe in olden times, horrible stories about horses being killed in ritual sacrifices to warriors and kings.”
    “It was the other way around here,” Xeena said. “Here people weren’t sacrificing horses to people. Here it was the people who were sacrificed to the horses.”
    “People being sacrificed to horses?” Alec said. “That’s a new one on me.”
    “These weren’t ordinary horses,” she said. “You should brush up on your history, Alec. Haven’t you ever heard of the labors of Hercules?”
    “Sure,” Alec said, “at least the one about Hercules cleaning out some king’s stables.”
    Xeena laughed. “I guess that makes sense,” she said. “Well, one of his other tasks was to rid the Thracian Bistones of four man-killing mares owned by the king there, horses so fierce they had to be tetheredwith chains because they could eat right through leather and rope.”
    “Sounds like a horse I knew once,” Alec said.
    “The king Diomedes who ruled the Bistones was a cruel demigod, a tyrant descended from Ares—the Greek god of war—and a mortal woman. Hercules captured the king’s mares but not before they killed Hercules’s friend Abderus, and Diomedes too. According to the myth, Hercules drove the