Comfrey stepped into the marked-off square. No sooner had he crossed the line than the bear reared up onto his hind legs. His fettered legs kept his steps small as he lumbered slowly toward Comfrey. The sailor wove one way and then abruptly dodged the other to slip past the bear and get behind him.
But he never had a chance. As if it were a move he had practised a hundred times, the bear turned and swatted the sailor down. His powerful front legs had a much greater reach than Wintrow would have credited. The impact of the blow slammed Comfrey face-first to the ground.
‘Get up, get up!’ his shipmates were yelling, and Wintrow found himself shouting with the rest. The bear continued his restless, shifting dance. He had dropped to all fours again. Comfrey lifted his face from the dusty street. Blood was streaming from his nose, but he seemed to take encouragement from his shipmates’ cheers. He sprang abruptly to his feet and dashed past the bear.
But the bear rose, tall and solid as a wall, and one outstretched paw greeted Comfrey’s head in passing. This time the sailor was flung to his back, his head rebounding from the dirt. Wintrow flinched and looked away with a groan. ‘He’s had it,’ he told Mild. ‘We’d better get him back to the ship.’
‘No, no. He’ll get up, he can do this. Come on, Comfrey, it’s just a big old stupid bear. Get up, man, get up!’ The other sailors from Vivacia were shouting as well, and for the first time Wintrow picked out Torg’s hoarse voice among the crowd. Evidently he had been dismissed by his captain to take some entertainment of his own. Wintrow was suddenly sure he’d have something witty to say about his missing shirt. Abruptly, he wished that he had never left the ship. This day had been one long string of disasters.
‘I’m going back to the boat,’ he said again to Mild, but Mild paid no attention. He only gripped his arm the harder.
‘No, look, he’s getting up, I told you he would. That’s the way, Comfrey, come on man, you can do it.’
Wintrow doubted that Comfrey heard anything Mild shouted. The man looked dazed still, as if instinct alone were compelling him to get to his feet and get away from the bear. But the instant he moved, the animal was on him again, this time clutching him in a hug. It looked laughable, but Comfrey cried out in a way that suggested cracking ribs.
‘Do you give up then?’ the beast-tamer shouted to the sailor, and Comfrey nodded his head violently, unable to get enough wind to speak.
‘Let him go, Sunshine. Let him go!’ the tamer commanded, and the bear dropped Comfrey and waddled away. He sat down obediently in the corner of the square and nodded his muzzled head all about as if accepting the cheers of the crowd.
Save that no one was cheering. ‘I had my every coin on that!’ one sailor shouted. He added a muttered comment about Comfrey’s virility that seemed to have little relation to bear wrestling. ‘It wasn’t fair!’ another added. That seemed to be the general consensus of those who had bet, but Wintrow noticed that not one of them followed it up with a reason why it was not fair. He himself had his own suspicions, but saw no reason to voice them. Instead he moved forward to offer Comfrey some help in getting to his feet. Mild and the others were too busy commiserating on what they had lost. ‘Comfrey, you moron!’ Torg called across the ring. ‘Can’t even get past a hobbled bear.’ A few other sour remarks confirmed that general opinion. The crew of Vivacia were not the only sailors to have lost their bets.
Comfrey got to his feet, coughing, then bent over to spit out a mouthful of blood. For the first time, he recognized Wintrow. ‘I nearly had him,’ he panted. ‘Damn near had him. Lost everything I’d won earlier. Well, I’m broke now. Damn. If I had just been a bit faster.’ He coughed again, then belched beerily. ‘I nearly won.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Wintrow said quietly, more to himself than to Comfrey. But the man heard him.
‘No, really, I almost had him, lad. If I’d a been a bit smaller, a bit quicker, we’d all have gone back to the ship with fat pockets.’ He wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand.
‘I don’t think so,’ Wintrow rejoined. To comfort him, he added, ‘I think it was rigged. I think the man that won was in league with the bear-man. They show you something that seems to make the bear give up, only it’s something he’s been taught to do. And then when you try it, the bear has been taught to expect you to try it. So you get stopped. Don’t feel bad, Comfrey, it wasn’t your fault. It was a trick. Let’s get you back to the ship now.’ He put a helping arm around the man.
But Comfrey abruptly wheeled away from him. ‘Hey! Hey, you. Bearman! You cheated. You cheated me and my friends.’ In the shocked silence that followed, Comfrey proclaimed, ‘I want my money back!’
The beast-tamer had been in the act of gathering his winnings preparatory to leaving. He made no reply but took up his animal’s chain. Despite Comfrey’s shout, he would have just walked off, if several sailors from another ship hadn’t stepped in front of him. ‘That true?’ one demanded. ‘Did you cheat? Is this rigged?’
The beast-tamer glanced about at the angry onlookers. ‘Of course not!’ he scoffed. ‘How could it be rigged? You saw the man, you saw the bear! They were the only two in the square. He paid for a chance to wrestle the bear and he lost. It doesn’t get any simpler than that!’
In a sense, what the man said was true, and Wintrow expected the sailors grudgingly to agree with it. He had not taken into account how much they had drunk, nor how much money they had lost. Once the accusation of cheating had been raised, a simple denial was not going to calm them. One, more quick-witted than the others, suddenly said, ‘Hey. Where did that fellow go, the one who won earlier? Is he your friend? Does the bear know him?’
‘How should I know?’ the bear owner demanded. ‘He’s probably off spending the money he won from me.’ A brief shadow of unease had flickered across the beast-tamer’s face, and he glanced about the crowd as if looking for someone.
‘Well, I think the bear’s been trained for this,’ someone declared angrily. It seemed to Wintrow the most obvious and, in this context, the stupidest statement that he’d heard yet.
‘It wasn’t a fair contest. I want my money back,’ another declared, and almost immediately this statement was taken up by the rest of the crowd. The bear’s owner again seemed to seek someone in the crowd, but found no allies there.
‘Hey. We said we want our money back!’ Torg pointed out to him. He swaggered up to put his face close to the beast-tamer’s. ‘Comfrey’s my shipmate. You think we’re going to stand by and see him beaten up and us cheated out of our hard-earned money? You made our man look bad, and by Sa’s balls, we don’t stand still for that!’ Like many a bully, he knew how to best rally men to their own self-interest. He glanced around at the men watching him and then turned back to the beast-tamer. He nodded significantly. ‘Think we can’t just take it if you choose not to give it?’ There was a rumbling of agreement from the others.
The beast-tamer was outnumbered and knew it. Wintrow could almost see him cast about for compromises. ‘Tell you what,’ he declared abruptly. ‘I didn’t cheat and my bear didn’t cheat, and I think most of you know that. But I can be fair and more than fair. Any one of you wants, I’ll let him wrestle the bear for free. If he wins, I pay off all the bets same as if that man had won. He loses, I keep the money. Fair enough? I’m giving you a chance to win back your money for free.’ After a brief pause, a muttering of agreement ran through the crowd. Wintrow wondered what fool would be the next to feel the bear’s strength.
‘Here, Win, you go against him,’ Comfrey suggested. He gave the boy a shove
