Waylander 3 – Hero in the Shadows By David Gemmell

The man shook his head vehemently. ‘I didn’t want to be here,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t my idea.’

‘I don’t steal pigs,’ said Yu Yu, then stalked away down the corridor, his good mood evaporating. There were scores of guards in the Grey Man’s palace and when next they came it would be in greater numbers. This meant, at best, a bad beating.

Yu Yu had suffered such beatings before, blows and kicks raining in on him. The last such attack, just over a year ago, had almost killed him. His left arm had been broken in three places. Several ribs had been snapped, one of which had pierced his lung. It took months to recover, months of hardship and hunger. Unable to work he had been reduced, at first, to begging for rice at the poorhouse. Finally he had journeyed back to the Source temple. Some of the priests still remembered him, and he had been welcomed warmly. They tended his broken bones, and fed him. When his strength returned he journeyed back to the site of his beating and sought out singly each of the eight men involved in the attack. And he thrashed them. The last had been the most difficult. Shi Da was six and a half feet tall, heavily muscled and supremely tough. It had been his kicks that had snapped Yu Yu’s ribs. Yu Yu had given a lot of thought to challenging Shi Da. It was a matter of honour that a challenge should be made, but the timing had to be exactly right.

So Yu Yu had walked up behind him in the Chong tavern and thwacked a heavy iron bar across the back of the man’s head. As he slumped forward Yu Yu struck him twice more. Shi Da had fallen to his knees, barely conscious. ‘I challenge you to man-to-man combat,’ said Yu Yu, in the time-honoured fashion. ‘Do you accept?’

A low garbled grunt of incomprehension came from the giant.

‘I shall take that as a yes,’ said Yu Yu. Then he kicked Shi Da in the jaw. Shi Da had hit the floor hard, then slowly rolled to his knees. Amazingly the big man climbed to his feet. Panicked, Yu Yu had dropped the iron bar and rushed in smashing blows left and right into Shi Da’s face. Shi Da landed one clumsy punch before pitching sideways to the floor.

In his relief Yu Yu felt magnanimous and only kicked the unconscious man a few times. It was a mistake. He should have knelt by him and beaten him to death. When Shi Da recovered he put out the word that he would cut Yu Yu Liang’s heart from his body and feed it to his dogs.

That was the day when Yu Yu decided upon an outlaw’s life in the mountains.

Now, in a foreign land, he had made more enemies. And he still did not know why. With a little more time to work on the translation Yu Yu realized that the man had called him a slant-eyed pig, and that the problem was, in fact, not about theft, but about making love to the blonde woman. It seemed peculiar to Yu Yu that the shape of his Chiatze eyes, or the golden colour of his skin, should preclude him from forming friendships with Kydor women. And why would he want to stick with his own kind? It was a mystery. Yu Yu had been a ditch-digger for nine years and had never met another ditch-digger he found remotely attractive.

Except for Pan Jian.

She was the only female ditch-digger he had ever known. A monstrous woman with huge arms and a flat round face that boasted several chins, two of which sported large, matching warts. One evening, when drunk and broke, he had propositioned her.

‘Pay me a compliment,’ she told him, ‘and I’ll think about it.’

Yu Yu stared at her through bleary eyes, searching for some evidence of femininity. ‘You have nice ears,’ he said at last.

Pan Jian had laughed. ‘That will do,’ she told him, and they had rutted in a ditch.

She had been dismissed two days later for arguing with the foreman. It was a short argument. He pointed out he had seen cows with smaller and more attractive arses than hers, and she had broken his jaw.