An archipelago of small green islands in a wide shallow bay, joined to each other by wooden bridges, and given over almost entirely to people enjoying themselves.
Getting there
Ch. 345. Finn leaves Solmere on a north cart at eleven in the morning of ch. 335 and reaches the coast on the third morning, having paid for the ride with two days of loading barrels of pickled herring at every stop.
The crossing is an hour and a half of grey open water with a cold wind coming off it, and for the first hour there is nothing to see.
Then the islands came up out of the haze ahead
The ferry puts in at the southernmost island, "which was all docks and customs and people carrying things".
The bridges
Every island is joined to its neighbours by wooden bridges, "long ones and short ones, some high and arched and some flat and low to the water, strung across the whole bay in a web that went further than he could see". There are lamps along them, lit even in daylight.
Nobody knows how many there are, and the not knowing is treated locally as the point.
MAN: Two hundred and eleven. FNN: You've counted? MAN: Everyone counts. It's the first thing everyone does. My wife's counted every summer for thirty years and she gets a different number every time. FNN: Who's right? MAN: Nobody knows. That's the charm of it, apparently.
The islands
Nothing about the place appears to have been planned, which is the only conclusion Finn arrives at: "It was everything. That was the only answer he ever arrived at."
- The food island. Stall after stall along one winding street, smoke going up from all of it. Oona keeps a chowder stall here.
- The beach island. People lie in rows on the sand on the seaward side "doing absolutely nothing", which Finn watches "with the fascination of somebody observing a foreign religion".
- The stage island. A troupe, a great deal of shouting, a man in a false beard, and a crowd of about two hundred who all know when to laugh.
- The gardens. One island that is only that.
- The tree. One island holding a single enormous tree and nothing else, with a small queue of people waiting to stand under it.
FNN: What's the tree for? WOM: It's the tree. FNN: Yes, but what's it for? WOM: It's the tree, love. You stand under it.
Ch. 346 gives it a price and a keeper. The fee is one copper, collected by an old man half asleep in a chair with a lantern and a tin with a slot in it, and at half past one in the morning there is no queue at all.
Half the islands fly flags in colours that do not match, and at least three of them have music coming off them, none of it the same tune.
The card island
At the far eastern end of the archipelago, larger than most, and reached by the longest bridge in Portvale: a high arched span with lamps every ten feet that come on at dusk and make the whole thing glow across the water.
It is the only quiet island, and ch. 345 makes that the first thing Finn notices about it.
Every other island in Portvale was loud, and that one was not. It had long low buildings with shutters and light coming out of the gaps, and people going across the bridge in ones and twos in good clothes, and nobody coming back across it laughing.
Ch. 345 ends with Finn walking out onto that bridge with twenty-six coppers. Ch. 346 is the other end of it, the same night.
Inside
A man on the door decides who comes in, and is explicit about what happens to anybody who causes trouble.
DOR: Copper tables are at the back. You cause trouble, you go in the water. FNN: Is that a figure of speech? DOR: No.
The room is "long and low and warm and very quiet, which was the first surprise", and the quiet is the whole character of the place. A dozen tables under low lamps. Nobody raises their voice.
The loudest sound in the room was cards, the soft continuous shuffle and slap of them, and underneath it the clink of coin being moved from one pile to another by people who did not appear to feel anything about it.
It smells of pipe smoke, candle wax and the sea. The front tables wear good clothes and do not look up; the back tables wear worse clothes and do not look up either. Tables are graded by stake, coppers at the back and silver at the front, and a player moves up through them.
When a hand becomes worth watching, a crowd gathers round it and says nothing.
Nobody cheered. They simply gathered, and watched, and said nothing.
Crowns
The game. Three cards down and two up with a round of betting between each, and "the whole of it came down to what you could make people believe you were holding". Not local: it is "played in every tavern from Draymere to the coast", and everybody in Corvane knows it, which puts it four provinces wide. Three of a kind is "very nearly the best hand available".
Who is there
Nobody here has an entry of their own. They are Portvale for the days the chapters spend in it.
Holt, the carter who brings Finn north. He does not speak for two days. At the coast he buys Finn a ferry ticket out of "what was evidently the man's first and only visible feeling in two days", and the whole of the conversation is three lines.
HOL: You worked. FNN: I did. HOL: Most don't.
Oona, broad, keeps a chowder stall on the food island. She hires Finn off the street because her boy has gone to watch the beard man, pays a copper an hour and a bowl at the end, and points him at a boathouse to sleep in with the words "don't ask me about it and don't let anyone see you".
Teddy, the boy who was meant to be helping her. He comes back on the second day, is comprehensively outworked, and leaves again in what Oona calls a sulk.
The man who counts bridges, elderly and well dressed, at the ferry rail. He is quoted above.
Isra, who keeps the card island. A small grey woman who does not raise her voice either, and who arrives at a table twenty seconds after a cheat is exposed at it. She has the house pay what it owes and she says what the house is for, in ch. 346.
ISR: Most don't. Not with a pile like that. They sit back down and I get it back by morning.
She pays Finn out of her own purse on the grounds that "the house paid for its own problems, and he had solved one", and sends him away kindly.
ISR: Then don't come back, lad. I mean that kindly.
Pelham, about forty, very well dressed, extremely pleasant, with the nicest manners at the table. He has been cheating it since the spring and Isra has had three complaints she could not prove. What gives him away to Finn is not a tell but the absence of one: "he knew what he had before he looked." He goes in the water.
The man on the door, who lets a fourteen year old in for one answer and is the one who carries Pelham out.
How it connects
- Solmere is three days south by cart, by way of every stop between the city and the coast.
- The ferry from the coast is an hour and a half, and lands at the southernmost island.
- Inside the archipelago there is no road. There are bridges, and there are at least two hundred and eleven of them.