An Unexpected Invitation
A royal messenger arrived at Sir Lumi's castle the next morning.
He read out a long, formal scroll. The summary was: would Sir Lumi please permit the royal goose-relocation project to encourage the geese to nest on her tower? In return, the King would pay a small annual fee.
Sir Lumi listened. She thought about it.
"Will the geese damage the tower?"
"No more than they have already damaged ours."
"Will my tower lean more because of the geese?"
"The royal architects say no. The lean is structural. The geese are decorative."
"Will I get to name them?"
"You can name them whatever you like, Sir Lumi."
Sir Lumi accepted.
She did not tell the other knights, who would have laughed. Instead, she watched.
That winter, geese started arriving at her tower. They came in twos and threes. They built nests on the leaning roof. The tilt was, as predicted, exactly what they liked: rain ran off, the wind gathered nicely, the angle was kind to their feet.
By spring there were forty-six geese. Sir Lumi named them: Goose 1, Goose 2, Goose 3, all the way up. (She had run out of imagination by Goose 6 and just kept counting.)
The geese kept the small mice down. The geese kept the snakes off the walls. The geese honked beautifully at dawn, like a free trumpet.
Sir Lumi started, slowly, to love her tower.