Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
I was expecting quite the holiday—a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to. Earlier that year I had wound my way through India, stopping at temples highlighted by a Lonely Planet guidebook, viewing the world through a manicured prism as any good tourist does—but my eyes had run out of space. By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.
“You won’t enjoy it.”
I held my tongue.
“Sure,” the voice on the telephone continued, “it’s phenomenal, but the accidents last year were horrific. Google them.”
It was high July when I rang Lucy, a past competitor. Down the line came factual splatter: broken ribs, amputated finger, cracked pelvises, punctured lung, torn ligaments, broken collarbones. On she went as I watched a ladybird crawl up the lamp at my side: bucking ponies, fraying girths, sicknesses, extreme dehydration, getting lost, not fun, don’t expect fun.
I couldn’t just slump there in that dusty Appleshaw chair and roll my eyes. Mongolia was coming for me in a month.
How many riders finished the race during her year?
“I think thirty-five of us started. . . . Seventeen finished.”
I thanked her and said goodbye, feeling my wrist wilt as I dropped the phone back onto the receiver. I wanted to pull out of the race. Summer had swallowed its charm.
In the kitchen I told my older brother Arthur the news as he traipsed on by.
“Oh my.” He shivered and dashed upstairs, relieved not to be me.
I could not pull out of the race—I had paid for it and written letters asking for charitable donations in the name of it—so I let the terror energize me instead. Asked afterwards if I would dare attempt the race again, I’d reply that I could never again be scared enough to do so. The supernatural power of fearing the unknown stunned me into a state of readiness. With four weeks to go, I launched my attack.
Although my application claimed I’d been riding five horses a day, this was fiction. I had been au pairing the toddler in Austria.
“Never too late,” declared Mum as she poured herself another cup of tea.
I volunteered at the local stud, where I began riding three or four horses a day. I also started playing tennis again and running farther than usual. It is a horse’s habit to pace about when she feels a storm approaching. Winding herself up seems to ready her for the coming saga. Now that I’ve forgotten the accompanying terror, I long for the manic flurry of those July days, hopping from horse to horse as I edged towards the race. The whole affair indulged my existence.
Bartramia, a small and racy gray, was the closest creature to a Mongolian pony I could find at the stud. I rode her through all the valleys—even rode her bareback once. Her canter quickened as my calves clung to her full-moon tummy, my boots ripping through the knee-high ragwort. Onwards she flew, a wood ahead, no sign of slowing.
“Woah!” I shouted into the wind at her ears—could I bear this for 1,000 kilometers? “Woah now!”
At the last second she jinked left, braking on the turn as my chest jolted over her shoulders, leaving me hanging on with my thighs as she picked up her gallop again, on up the hill along the rim of the woods.
This was the terrible thrill. Come August I would encounter it atop twenty-five wilder ponies, free of the tightly bound English fields. Our Mongolian ponies would be the descendants of Genghis Khan’s famed Takhi horses, who shouldered his empire’s postal system from the thirteenth century onwards. Their speed allowed letters from Siberia to arrive in Poland within twelve days, though our ride wouldn’t go beyond the border of Mongolia’s green oasis—a wide island surrounded by the Gobi Desert to the south, the barren Altai Mountains to the west, and the freezing wastelands of Siberia on the northern border with Russia.
I had begun to notice how the idea of Mongolia made many a Brit go quiet. I don’t think the reason is Genghis Khan as much as the void in our history. Where British culture has not forced its influence, we tread carefully, sensing a different lay of the land. England was crafted by roads and fields, flooded with a web of happenings with which I was familiar. The steppe would strip all this away.
The race was set to begin on August 4. In the first week of July, the organizers sent me a month-by-month “Your Year of the Derby” calendar. They had sent this to everyone else at the beginning of the year, since they had applied on time. We were advised to assemble our gear in February, get vaccinated in April, commence language-learning in May, use July to visit relatives and update our wills, and devote the entire year to training.
Maggie, an endurance-riding specialist, had apparently been sending handouts on fitness, navigation, horse pacing, and hydration. “You’ve missed those now and it’s too late for you to be training anyway. You can’t get fitter in the final two weeks,” she stated on the telephone. I gulped and clung closer to the daft resistance within me.
The month-by-month calendar from the organizers read: You could do all your preparation in July if you have unusually low blood pressure—no? Thought not.
I do happen to have low blood pressure, and a low heart rate. Perhaps that would help. When I was small and we measured our vital signs in class, Mrs. Bleakley said my results meant either I was an athlete, or I was nearly dead, or I couldn’t count. Likely the latter—despite being a decade older when I entered the race, I still struggled with numbers and time.
July rolled by. I researched all the race’s sore statistics and found that Lucy was right. Every year just over half the field made it to the finish. No woman had ever won the Derby, nor had a Briton. South Africans tended to triumph. The youngest person ever to cross the finish line had been twenty-three.
Me? I was not young. I had long since given up my rubber ducklings, I had finished high school, I felt ancient as a walnut.
Meanwhile, my father had forgotten his resistance. He helped me draft letters to family and friends asking for contributions to the charities I had chosen to ride in the name of—Macmillan Cancer Support and Greenhouse Sports. The latter, which sets up sports programs for London teenagers struggling with school, was a charity that amazed me, perhaps because sport had felt like my own lifeline in the city.
I needed to focus on this campaign before departure. No one would donate when I returned from the race having managed only 10 of the 1,000 expected kilometers. Aware now that the other riders had signed up for the Derby in October, giving them ten months to train and plan how much toilet paper to pack, I implied in my letters that I, too, had been aiming at the race for about a year.
When I was young, Dad had often called me “Sporty Mouse.” I was flat-chested and athletic enough that you couldn’t tell me apart from my brothers. In fact, as far as I was concerned, I was a boy. I existed in the mold of my siblings. I scorned at girly-girls with Barbies and bolted from pink, that color of social catastrophe—sickly and sweet, nothing like me. I sat best with blue, the color of distance and coldness, the favorite of my brothers and mother, too. “Where’s my willy?” I demanded of her in the bath at age three. She and I have hair growing out of us in surprising places. She says the forests on my legs and the two-inch hair growing by my belly button mean I’m strong.
The other half of the picture is one I tended to ignore. Mum sometimes referred to me as “Sensitive Mouse.” My stomach has ached since I was fifteen, I blush all the time, and my skin rashes red when you so much as brush a finger over it. You know what