Looking around, he spotted the woman from the beach, Teal Leadwood, on the top tier of the women’s benches, muffled in her coat – he saw now that it was some kind of fur, dyed a vivid scarlet. She was about Thorn’s age, with a pleasant round face and rings clipped along the edges of her ears. On the far side of the pit, under a lamp hung from a tall pole, Noble Seatree was talking with three men. He seemed to be in a good mood, laughing at something one of the men said, punching another on the shoulder, all of them turning as the bugling cries of curs sounded somewhere out in the snowy dark. A hush spread through the crowd and people leaned in their seats, looking towards the aisle between the tiers of benches. Gentle nudged Pilgrim and said, ‘Here we go.’

Four men walked into the lamplight, dressed in the leather jackets, cord breeches and knee-high boots of hunters. One wore a green cap with a long feather cocked in it and carried a cornet, two more were armed with long pikes tipped with iron blades, and the fourth held the leashes of two curs that strained towards the pit, eager for battle. The two pikemen shoved the striplings aside and jumped into the pit and levelled their weapons as the bear pushed to its hind legs and faced them, its back pressed against the post.

When he had agreed to come, Pilgrim had told himself that he would watch the ritual with the detachment of a professional observer, but as people stood up around him, hooting and whistling and stamping their feet, an infectious excitement fizzed in his blood. Gentle had stood up too. There was another surge of noise as the man with the feathered cap blew a long discordant note on his cornet. He made a short speech, saying he was glad to see everyone gathered here in neighbourly concord, and hoped that he and his comrades would more than satisfy their expectations. There was hooting and whistling at that, and more hooting and whistling when he said that the man and his curs needed no introduction, and introduced them anyway.

The man holding the leashes of the curs raised a hand when his name was called out, and the curs howled into the noise of the crowd. They were big lean animals with grey pelts and ruffs of black hair, eyes blankly reflecting lamplight as they wailed their avowal.

The man with the feathered cap blew another braying note and asked the spectators to sit down. In the silence that followed the rustle of movement, the bear raised its paws and began to groan and grunt. Its stubby fingers were spread wide, tipped with stout black thorns. The crowd jeered and the bear shook its head and groaned and grunted again: the same sequence of sounds, a guttural groan, several short panting grunts, two more groans.