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like hams. His two boys were small and fast and looked as if they might have a second profession in crime.
    ‘A golden bear of the Wild! Today only!’ he bellowed, and his boys roamed through the market, shouting ‘Come and see the bear! The golden bear!’
    The market was full, as market can only be at the first breath of spring when every farmer and petty-merchant has been cooped up in a croft or a town house all winter. Every goodwife had
new-made baskets to sell. Careful farmers had sound winter apples and carefully hoarded grain on offer. There were new linens – shirts and caps. A knife grinder did a brisk trade, and a dozen
other tradesmen and women shouted their wares – fresh oysters from the coast, lambs for sale, tanned leather.
    There were close on five hundred people in the market, and more coming in every hour.
    A taproom boy from the inn rolled two small casks up, one at a time, placed a pair of boards across them and started serving cider and ale. He set up under the old oak that marked the centre of
the market field, a stone’s throw from the bear master.
    Men began to drink.
    A wagoner brought his little daughter to see the bear. It was female, with two cubs. They were beautiful, with their gold-tipped blond fur, but their mother smelled of rot and dung. Her eyes
were wild, and when his daughter touched one of the cubs the fearsome thing opened its jaws, and his daughter started at the wicked profusion of teeth. The growing crowd froze and then people
shrank back.
    The bear raised a paw, stretching the chains—
    She stood her ground. ‘Poor bear!’ she said to her father.
    The bear’s paw was well short of touching the girl. And the pain of moving against the spiked manacles overcame the bear’s anger. It fell back on all fours, and then sat again,
looking almost human in its despair.
    ‘Shh!’ he said. ‘Hush, child. It’s a creature of the Wild. A servant of the enemy.’ Truth to tell, his voice lacked conviction.
    ‘The cubs are wonderful.’ The daughter got down on her haunches.
    They had ropes on them, but no more.
    A priest – a very worldly priest in expensive blue wool, wearing a magnificent and heavy dagger – leaned down. He put his fist before one of the cubs’ muzzles and the little
bear bit him. He didn’t snatch his hand back. He turned to the girl. ‘The Wild is often beautiful, daughter. But that beauty is Satan’s snare for the unwary. Look at him. Look at
him!’
    The little cub was straining at his rope to bite the priest again. As he rose smoothly to his feet and kicked the cub, he turned to the bear master.
    ‘It is very like heresy, keeping a creature of the Wild for money,’ he said.
    ‘For which I have a licence from the Bishop of Lorica!’ sputtered the bear master.
    ‘The bishop of Lorica would sell a licence to Satan to keep a brothel,’ said the priest with a hand on the dagger in his belt.
    The wagoner took hold of his daughter but she wriggled free. ‘Pater, the bear is in pain,’ she said.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. He was a thoughtful man. But his eyes were on the priest.
    And the priest’s eyes were on him.
    ‘Is it right for us to hurt any creature?’ his daughter asked. ‘Didn’t God make the Wild, just as he made us?’
    The priest smiled and it was as terrible as the bear’s teeth. ‘Your daughter has some very interesting notions,’ he said. ‘I wonder where she gets them?’
    ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ the wagoner said. ‘She’s just a child.’
    The priest stepped closer, but just then the bear master, eager to get a show, began to shout. He had quite a crowd – at least a hundred people, and there were more wandering up every
minute. There were half a dozen of the earl’s soldiers as well, their jupons open in the early heat, flirting with the farmers’ daughters. They pushed in eagerly, hoping to see
blood.
    The wagoner pulled his daughter back, and let the soldiers pass between him and the priest.
    The bear