Gaunt objected to the Petition for ten minutes by the Forge clock, and he did it with the bellows roaring at his back and his hammer still in his hand, because a Smith who puts down his tool to object is a Smith who has already lost the argument.
He began with the word citizen.
It was a word for towns, he said. It belonged to the walls of places where people came and went through a gate with a bell over it and a Charter nailed to the post. It did not belong to a forge. A forge did not have citizens. A forge had a fire and an anvil and a Smith who could be relied on to know which end of the hammer was for striking, and if the Petition wished to call the Smith a citizen it might as well call the anvil a magistrate, which Gaunt would object to in the same breath.
Then he objected to by its own name.
A smith’s name was on the hammer, he said. It was stamped into the head of the tool, where the handle went in, and any Smith who had ever worked in the Lessary Vale could tell you the mark from across a market. It was not in the Great Hall. It was not in the Chamber’s book, or the Crown’s ledger, or the Chancellor’s file. It was in the iron, and the iron did not go to Sallowmere, and the Crown had no more…
