Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
home, where I shall strip my wallpaper, sharpen all the pencils, and lavish myself in mundane things that could have been just as exciting as this race if only I’d used my imagination.
I can’t be sure we’re going the right way—the GPS is not clear, much less the landscape. I look about the valley and wonder where I’m headed, and indeed where my head is. How much of us is really moving forward if Brolly has already given up? After swinging south of the mountain range, the cat is truly out of the bag: he hates this. I get off and walk next to him.
At home, the pain of animals makes me shiver: when the dog whines after stealing too much salted butter or falls ill with testicle pain, or when my brother Arthur taunts me with “I’m going to put Hammy in the oven” and I shriek over the fictitious fate of my hamster. Now, at the center of a signless valley, I can offer no solution to the gray pony at my side.
As we go like treacle towards the hill, I relax out of my tantrum into a more bland potato state of mind. For some minutes, I relocate myself in June, back when I was looking forward to this race with such romantic ideas, of dancing ponies on blankets green, of dazzling scenes and legs so keen. I don’t know which wise man coined the saying “Life begins outside your comfort zone,” but Brolly and I have proven him wrong. Life, whatever that is, has gotten a wagonload worse. Stuck in a sludgy slow-motion, still walking at Brolly’s side, I move with my usual stomachache and dull thoughts of a missed lunch. Quitting the expectation game, one horse at a time.
We’re 2 kilometers from the station when a herder in a maroon cloak trots into our universe. He makes choppy gestures for me to remount, so I wing my legs back onto Brolly, whose eyes are now surrounded by gunk. The man leans over to whip my dear plod every stride. I see how his technique keeps Brolly trotting, and I question why I didn’t use it too.
The urtuu ahead is formed on a lull of earth that rises to tumbling rock formations. A steppe town glistens on the heat-waved horizon. At the urtuu I will hand Brolly over to the vets for assessment. Because our leg has taken five hours, the other riders will be gone by the time we arrive.
Propped on a bank before the station is a Soviet-era camper van. An interpreter and a paramedic crouch at its wheels, hiding from the sun, perhaps thinking, Yawn, here comes another rider. I am just a piece of driftwood, floating down the stream.
“Am I the last?” I ask.
They’re surprised I didn’t know. “Yes, apart from Matthias.”
Home time. Teatime. This must be more or less the finish line. Waiting for the vet, I breathe in the cheese scent of Brolly’s goatskin bridle. There is something cozy about the smell of decay.
Seven riders are still at the urtuu waiting for their ponies’ heart rates to drop. Time never ceases in the race—each minute waiting for a horse’s heart is a minute wasted or savored: it depends on whether you prefer your legs apart or together. Yesterday Maggie the steward told me that most of the horses ridden in each Derby—nearly a thousand are gathered in its name—have heart rates that fall below 64 beats per minute within ten minutes, unless the weather is this kind of despicable sauna. Even Brolly, who stands before me having done so little, takes twelve minutes to go from 72 to 64 bpm.
I find a single bar of signal on my phone while waiting and use it to text the Mongol Derby blog. My message is only a sentence. It doesn’t dare mention the race. Maybe that’s because I feel the Derby might be an illusion and I want to exist beyond it. Instead, I complain about the plums ripening without me at home. Picking plums is one of only two moments in life in which I really feel at ease, the other being when I’m lost in the troughs of my yawns. Every year I involve myself in the plums’ journeys from March to August—green to purple, hard to soft, healthy to diseased—their changing skins mapping the arc of each summer, their flesh tasting of sun and birthday and moments alone.
Tom hangs in a sweat nearby, his torn shoulder crumpled into his sling, his other arm draped over his steed’s neck. Richard the photographer mills about, his gray hair striking upwards. I see Maggie fix her eyes on me. She orders Brolly to trot. I wake him up and we hop into rhythm.
“Your horse,” she booms after ten strides, “is lame.”
I wince. Lame? Limping and injured? My stomach recoils. I was a bit suspicious two hours ago when Richard drove back past in his jeep.
“He feels lame!” I’d yelled to him. “Does he look lame?”
“Looks fine.”
To avoid a penalty we’re supposed to dismount lame horses and walk them to the nearest station. I should never have gotten back on. Richard chips into Maggie’s glare and decides my fate.
“No, no. T’sallright, Maggie. I passed them earlier. Pony was sound.” His faint Irish accent unstiffens the consonants.
Maggie turns her attention elsewhere. Why she’ll take the word of a photographer, I don’t know. I untack the little gray—who will now have days, or even months, off. Bye-bye, Brolly.
In a few weeks’ time I’ll make an inventory of the ponies I’ve ridden, in case I forget any of them. 1: Umbrella/Brolly—Small. Gray. Lame.
After a certain number of days, straggling riders get kicked out of the race because the crew cannot monitor the field if it spreads out too much. I’ll be the first cast-off if I don’t get a move on. But where are the toilets? I’m looking for a complex similar to that of start camp. When a rider points me to a lone hole in the ground concealed by a flap of material, I decide I’ll wait for the next station.
I stride up the horse line, a rope suspended between poles, and pause at each pony tied to the rope—brown, gray, spotted, black, then red. Which of these stumpy legs is willing? I’m seeking someone who will bolt me to the next station, but they all stand in sun-smothered slumbers, occasionally shaking their manes to throw off the flies. Before I left I asked my aunt if she had advice on picking a semiwild horse from a selection of up to forty. “Bloody hell, no,” she replied.
Behind the lines, the herders are laughing. Maybe I look like an idiot, I don’t know. When I point at a big brown pony with a red noseband, one man in a gray cloak cackles louder. I frown and turn to his son, whose smirk is just as strong. It seems they have secrets about my desired mount. I look back to the pony’s eye.
The herders do know all sorts of things; for example, horses with pointy ears tend to have healthier kidneys, which is news to me. They may know of an affliction in this pony. Or they may be amused at the thought of a girl handling him. Some Mongolian writers say women are respected here (whatever that has ever meant), as they were during the medieval empire, when they exercised power—Töregene Khatun, the wife of Chinggis Khan’s son, ruled as regent for five years—but perhaps they’re not always so welcome on the horse-racing scene. There was only one girl among many boys in the short race we saw at start camp.
Though many people outside of Ulaanbaatar know how to ride, the warrior arts are reserved for men. Lucy, the past competitor I spoke to on the phone, said herders, when asked, sometimes recommend slower horses to female riders out of concern for their safety. I leave the herders’ lingering laughter and scoop up my saddle to lay it on the brown pony’s back.
Saddles in England are traditionally leather and saddles in Mongolia are wood, but we’re using nylon endurance saddles. We also have two girths to stop them from slipping around to the horses’ underbellies, since a capsized rider is a classic equestrian accident.
When I return from refilling my collapsible water bottle, an English competitor in sunglasses shouts over to me.
“Wait for me while I go to the loo, yah?”
The vowels of her refined English accent resonate across the heat. At home I wouldn’t have noticed her voice—it simply echoes mine—but out here I envisage a British flag and awful cries of Empire! Empire! or War? Why not!
Distance