Black and grey dragon on shoulder and chest

The abbot has finally let me stop scraping the screens, so I write to you from the cold room above the kitchen, where the ink takes three days to dry. You asked whether the master from Kyoto really painted the dragon in a single night. He did not. He arrived on the feast of the first frost with a satchel of brushes wrapped in silk, a pot of soot ground so fine it smelled of pine, and a roll of paper he would not let anyone touch. For six days he worked only at dawn, before the bell, and he would not let me watch the head.

The dragon climbs from the lower panels, its tail coiled around the pillar of the north hall, and rises through clouds he made by letting the ink bleed and then lifting it with a dry brush, so the white shows through like frost on glass. Where the scales meet the mane he laid black so dense that the paper seemed to swallow the lamplight. Then he picked out each scale with a line finer than a hair, and at the throat he used one stroke of white that he said had taken eleven tries.

On the last morning I found the screen still damp and the master gone. The head had shifted. Its eye, which had been fixed on the gate, now looked down the corridor towards the room where the novices sleep. I thought I had mixed the ink wrongly. The abbot only laughed and said a good dragon never stays where it is painted. We have kept the screens shut since.

Each night I hear rain on the roof and something sliding behind the cloud panels, like a robe drawn slowly across a floor. I bring the lamp and find the clouds exactly as they were, only a little nearer the door. Pray for me, and do not bring the boy with the cough to see the screen.