On the eve of the race, we ate a sacrificed sheep, the smell of whose blood still hung about in the air when I sidled up to Devan Horn to find out a little more. She was a gap that needed filling; I’d been circling around her in conversations all day. I found her facing away from the fire with her arms crossed. She answered my queries looking straight at me, the firelight flickering up her rounded cheeks. She was studying criminology at “the third-best school for criminology in the U.S.” and had grown up in Austin, Texas. She was on the U.S. national endurance riding team and “only” twenty years old. She asked me no questions. The conversation concluded with silence.
An American film crew from ABC had arrived earlier that afternoon to make a documentary of the Derby. They quickly discovered “Devan’s bravado” and took wide-angled shots of her staring at the horizon in her slick purple sunglasses, the wind mopping her hair and jostling the grasses behind her.
“What’s the plan, you gonna win this thing?”
She looked at the interviewer, deadpan. Universe, move out the way. Behold, Devan Horn, endurance rider from the West. “Yes.”
What had we all missed by not growing up in Texas?
I think the rest of us understood we, too, needed faith in the race and in ourselves. But we were under the impression that we would need just as much doubt, since the odds were against us. Could envisaging victory, or foretelling any story, make it come true? Well, what if the race had already happened, in all our preparatory thoughts and words, and we were simply now going to receive it?
I hummed my way back to the ger, where Paddy and Matthias were in mad-rabbit mode, flinging discarded headlamps and Mongolian phrasebooks over their shoulders. They had come lathered in death-prevention equipment but they needed now to minimize their luggage weight. Theirs was a very professional paranoia, one that rendered most alternative attitudes naive. I slid into bed and wrote in my Winnie-the-Pooh notebook, feeling I was no match for their good middle age and doubled-up mapping systems.
Matthias soon interrupted our sleep to announce he felt very smelly. I lifted my head to check if his words were real. His legs sprawled off the end of his mattress.
“Why do you smell?” I asked.
“It’s all the carbs I’ve been eating at this base camp,” he sighed. “Making me really stinky.”
Minutes later he let out a prolonged, equine groan.
XII
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
—The Tempest
What gets you out of bed? The thought of breakfast.
What gets you out of bed? The idea there is somewhere to go.
It is the first morning of the race proper. An hour before the start gun, the mist gives way to a weighty heat. I wander among scurrying riders—saddles taped, ropes tied, Sesame Snaps packed—and queue up for luggage weigh-ins with scary steward Maggie. Others have packed a perfect 4.9 kilograms, just below the 5-kilogram limit. My kit, dangling from the miniature scales, only weighs 3.4 kilograms. Maggie deals me a look. I sprint up to the ger and stuff in some of Paddy’s unwanted toilet paper, unsure what else to take. According to one of the race organizers, Mongolians on the steppe often travel unladen, barely a vegetable in tow.
When the herder hands me the reins of a tiny gray pony, I think, Oh dear, if only I were as little. Snoozing Todd, my Australian tent-mate, waltzes over to the horse lines a few minutes after me as though it’s all a giant holiday. We are the last to arrive.
My tendency for lateness comes from a fear of feeling committed when early. Even on the special occasions when I decide to be early, I still end up being late. Time is a muscle that seems to randomly flex and relax in a bid to misplace me and many others. I can’t rid myself of the sensation that I’m about to fall off the world, as you might fall off the back of a treadmill.
The entity in charge of my dreams brings this theme up at least once a week. While writing about the race, I’ve had some specific Mongol Derby dreams in which I’m terribly behind time. In one, I can’t make the decision to sign on, and when I do, I’m too late, so I just drive the race in a car through a fantastic hybrid country of futuristic San Francisco, Mongolian steppe, and rural England. In another, I’m forced to bicycle through a swimming pool to get to the start of the race in time, but I miss it anyway. Time always wins.
I swing myself on. The gray horse and I walk over to Richard, the photographer, and I ask him to lengthen the pony’s bridle. I’ve seen other riders treating Richard with half-bowed heads—but the pony resists, butting him in the armpit as we turn away. I fear for his camera.
We move to the start line, tensed upon our horses, talking at their ears. There are stories of carnage at past race starts—ponies celebrating the gathering by flinging their backs and disposing of their riders. The pony I’m on doesn’t seem the type for such theatrics. He walks in a trance, his tail swishing against space, sights of grass. So much to eat, so little time. Is that what they all think? He sighs.
Ahead on the plain a blue banner hangs from leaning stumps: WELCOME BRAVE RIDERS. It’s a brittle sight. I am not brave, am actually very jittery—scared of the dark in the yard at home, always creeping through it in the gait of a chicken. Then again, I’m tired of the hype. Even here on the start line, I only half believe the stories about the race being so awful. A part of me is looking back up at the world from its underbelly, saying Come along, don’t be scared, there’s nothing down here, like Dad used to say from the cellar, even if it was full of deadly winter frogs.
We congregate around a red-robed lama, or “high priest,” who sits cross-legged on the grass. When he begins chanting a blessing for our journey, we try to hold the ponies still but they’re fidgeting in reaction to our nerves. Todd is slurping water at my side. Bubbles slip up the plastic tube from his backpack to his mouth. He radiates the smell of last night’s beer. Around us are the other twenty-nine riders. I feel the steppe inspect us: a curious bunch, a motley crowd, a sea of legs dropping from horse tummies. In one of her text messages, Aunt Lucinda worried that my long legs would drag on the ground from a Mongolian pony. She suggested I purchase roller skates to protect my feet.
My aunt and I did not part on the best of terms. The day before she went to Austria, I decided to rub some sweat off her horse’s tummy while she was near his head, which upset him enough to bite her boob. She got cross. I think she was in large amounts of boob-specific pain. I felt bad. In Ulaanbaatar, I received a wordless email from her, with a photo of a pink-and-purple breast in the attachment. The subject line instructed me not to share it with anyone else.
Some minutes into the chant, my gray pony begins dancing his hooves. A giggle ricochets down my body. I turn him away and see Matthias splatted out on the ground. Above him stands his confused pony—What little effort, for such results. The lama in red chants on, unaware. To the rescue strides the British doctor assigned to monitor competitors. He picks his way through the ponies, moving to the glory of his bristling beard, and leans down to inspect the wilted Matthias, while the Scottish head vet marches in to catch the loose pony. It kicks him. He rebounds with a pained vowel, muffling his whelp so as not to interrupt the lama.
Twelve minutes of chanting quietens us, though most riders don’t know quite what has been said—as far as I’m aware, none of us understands Tibetan. I have a verdant urge to explode into the plains. There’s an umbrella planted at an angle ahead, absurd in the midmorning heat. If ultra-trained Matthias is already on the ground, I’ve no hope of making it beyond the horizon line. So I’ll be the first past that umbrella and at least begin the race with a win.
“Shall we give o’er and drown?” says the Boatswain in The Tempest. “Have you a mind to sink?”
10 a.m.
Bang.
Katy, 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.
XIII
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 steppe 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 competitor’s ride.
As far as I can tell, there are no urtuus in sight. I’d imagined the medieval postal system the race is re-creating 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 journey aboard the first horse climaxes when I enter a silent tantrum. Perhaps I believe this tantrum will offer escape. That it w
ill transport me 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.
Rough Magic Page 4