Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, fires a handgun and my pony—the only gray in the group—yawns into a rocking-horse canter. I hold myself in, absorbing the waves of his motion. “Choo choo!” I flick his shoulder twice. It’s enough to shock him into a gallop. We reach the umbrella first. Delight.
We’ve cast away, movement wildly calming. Up the striding plain we go, in a group formed like a bicycle peloton. Riders shift between brisk trots and uncertain canters. The photographer bounces by, and I’m caught in a snap with Tom. My mother will make her disapproving face when she sees it. His sunglasses are thin and unfriendly; he drives his pony with the sobriety of a pilot.
My hues are mainly blue, jodhpurs being navy (sporting the name of Mum’s jewelry business, Julia Lloyd George—my clothing sponsor) and vest being denim. The latter may prove me the teenager I suppose I still am. Lower down I’ve wrapped my calves in two pairs of half chaps to prevent the mango-sized welts Devan warned me about. On my head is Aunt Lucinda’s lightweight riding helmet. She told me it would be too thin to protect me if I fell, but I was taken with the idea that it would absorb my forehead sweat.
When the film crew passes by in their jeeps, Monde, a horse-whisperer from South Africa, waves to them. Monde is the Derby’s first black competitor, and some Mongolian families at the horse stations will line up for photos with him, not having met someone with dark skin before. I follow Monde’s lead, gesturing and grinning to the film crew. Glee is my favorite train to catch; it really carries me. Soon I am letting out shrill hollers and woo-hoos.
Monde’s employers had teamed up to pay for his race entry. Many others in our crowd had sponsors’ logos pasted on their helmets. Others still were in immense debt, having had no luck with commercial support. As I rode that first leg, I questioned again why we were all willing to give up so much for a horse race. We seemed to have paid an extortionate amount to live out the idea of returning to a wilder time.
The jeeps disappear. Riders splay out into the unknown. My pony is slow. We fall from group to group until we’re alone. He plods up a rise in the land, one hour in. I will call him “Brolly” after the leg, because of his speed to the umbrella at the start. “Gelatinous disc of a jellyfish” is the dictionary’s fourth meaning for “umbrella,” and Brolly now drifts in a jellyfish fashion, awaiting a current to carry us. Wild horses often move with the weather. With no coming storms to bluster his backside, Brolly and I fall so far behind I can’t even see any dots of riders ahead.
Where to go? I was hoping to follow someone. Every minute I scan the horizon in search of the next station. I almost lose my balance taking in the transparent distances. I can see only sun. Her heat is swelling me, I feel I no longer fit inside my body.
Apparently the horse stations, or urtuus, are formed by two or three white gers and a horse line. Earlier in the summer the Derby’s head horseman Unenburen Uyndenbat traveled the steppe with race organizers to ask families if they could bring thirty to forty ponies together to make an urtuu. Some families have as many as two hundred horses and can create a station singlehandedly; others team up with neighboring herders. On the days when the riders are expected to arrive, the selected ponies wait around the urtuu horse lines, and the families charge the organizers for each pony competitors ride.
As far as I can tell, there are no urtuus in sight. I’d imagined the medieval postal system the race re-creates as a series of stations spaced according to the contours of the country; I thought I might always be able to see the next station on the horizon.
From my denim vest pocket I unleash the one, the only, the cumbersome Garmin eTrex GPS: a thing like a mobile phone from the 1990s, coated in gray rubber with a small screen. I have been too scared to turn it on, in case my very touch tampers with its highly strung technological heart. Now it is blinking to life and rudely suggesting we’re only a quarter of the way to the first station.
It must be past lunchtime when my pony and I head out of the plains towards a mountain range. Sweat is dribbling over my eyelids, and the cross-strap backpack is digging into my ribs. I have run out of water. My mouth is dry. I think of lancing Brolly’s veins and drinking his blood, Mongol-warrior-style—Chinggis Khan and comrades rode horses to near-death on the campaign trail—but as we totter on, old Khan is forgotten. The medieval re-creation seems a farce. At the level of each beating hoof, this race superlatively long and tough might turn out to be chronically ordinary. We’re just trotting a path through grass.
Brolly is thirsty too. The map book instructs us to seek water in wells, rivers, lakes, ponds, springs, and waterholes, none of which we’ve passed. I sneak a Sesame Snap from my pocket and munch in rhyme to Brolly’s trot. Then I look at my watch again, five minutes since I last looked at it. Time becomes a tool for passing time itself.
As we curve each valley corner, we set the plains behind us free. Grasslands pull the summerscape in every direction. Green, green, gulping us up. Where the grass ceases, blue sky begins, translucent and bold. “Blue and green should not be seen, without a color in between,” begins my mother, babbling in my head wherever I go. “Blue and green should be seen,” she carries on, reminding me of the philosophy behind her jewelry making, which marries emeralds to sapphires at every opportunity.
Brolly, a young soul under old fur, is ever slower. My, just a horse race, don’t be silly. Between each urtuu are roughly 40 kilometers, and I have no idea how far that really is. It will turn out to be neither here, nor here, nor there at the bottom of the page. It is nestled far outside this rectangle.
I rise up, I sit down. I rise up, I sit down. A thousand beats of trot and still the scenery won’t shift. Nor are there any nooks or lonesome trees for me to chat to. As soon as I’m tempted to get upset, the undetailed land sits on my drama, as if to say, I don’t give a damn. Brolly and I are mere passersby. A train of bad thoughts. He blows through his nose most beats. I snort in agreement. Forgive me for asking, long girl, but would you allow someone to balance on your back in this manner? God no. Rather die, I would. Than be possessed like this?
Well, I’m not sure I really like being aboard a horse, either. I can’t believe it’s taken all these years to hit me again—my original sentiment. It’s visible in a photo of me age three on Costa, my cousin’s Shetland pony. I should stare boldly over the pony’s head—carefree niece of a champion—but my eyebrows are swept together in a frown. I want to return to the ground where my brothers stand, flanking Costa’s shoulders. To be up here, in this pose, is strange and exhausting: legs strained, back stiff, knees hinged.
We enter a burnt valley, green grass paled to yellow, earth chapped and bare. A series of creases forms the unreachable hills ahead.
So this was how racing would be? A serious struggle, or perhaps an unserious struggle. If I did manage to finish, I was probably going to be last—nothing I minded when it came to exams, but I couldn’t stand the idea of it in a race.
Apparently the matter in our bodies only makes up a tiny speck of dust. It has something to do with the distances between our atoms being so vast—as vast as the distances between urtuus.
To the people I wrote to before departure, pleading for charitable donations, I was exactly this, I suppose: a tiny speck among other bunched specks. I hated the idea that I could be seen now, even in minuscule form, as I rode. I wanted to purge myself from the radar. Was anyone I knew even looking at the tracking map? I’d told my charitable sponsors that 40 percent of riders never made it to the finish. Some of my parents’ friends had taken the trouble to write encouraging notes like I do hope you don’t get a sore behind.
As the hours rolled by, voices leaked in—the future’s past-tense voices. What stories would they pluck from the skies if and when I disappeared from the map?
Her armpit hair grew too long.
She missed the plums and her father’s blackened toast, his figure by the slowly roaring fridge.
My