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.”
XIV
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 beats per minute.
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. Women, say some Mongolian writers, 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 has a strange ability to make matters more acute. I’m uneasy about my Britishness, and its link to the quest for empire—a past long gone, but not gone yet, a past that feels, in this moment, to be one of its defining features.
The English competitor is visibly still at the toilet when I scribble my signature on the sign-out sheet. When a journalist publishes an article online about my attempt at the race, she writes it in my first-person voice, using tenuous quotes like If someone is injured or in trouble of course I’ll stop, but I don’t plan to wait for anyone who can’t find their gloves. It makes me sound ruthless. I mean, it’s true I don’t wait for the English competitor, but she will find others to ride with—many at this urtuu are stagnant in the midday sun, still awaiting their horses’ recoveries.
My other option is to hang around and continue alone in last position to satisfy the part of me that likes being slow and disaster-ridden. Aunt Lucinda still enters some competitions, but with a less good horse than those she used to ride, and never for a placing or a prize.
“Are you sure you want to compete at Blenheim to be bottom?” her half sister Karol asked her this year.
“Well, someone has to be bottom,” she replied.
I think my tendency to be bottom is at odds with my urge to move—and no better animal with whom to move away than the horse, the king of flight.
The brown pony canters me off into the waiting land ahead. By the hill we are bolting, up and up towards a curtain of sky. I fold my back low to the gallop, leaning parallel to the lightning beneath me. His power is pure as an idea. After plodding on Brolly, it’s a relief to feel movement for the love of it.
We move as a circuit: down my arms, into his head, back to his body, and up my legs as the mud flies from his hooves. I’m thankful there are no English village lawns to worry about mashing up.
Adam and Lynne, with whom I left the last station, keep the pace. Our twelve legs travel with the swiftness and intention of an invasion. I am certain, perhaps prematurely, that I lie in good hands. Adam is an American with well-sculpted features and dark hair. His horse is corkscrewing and tugging at his reins. Lynne is a Canadian businesswoman and mother of many. She sent me for my final shower yesterday since I had forgotten, as usual, to wash.
After half an hour, Lynne’s pony shoots ahead into the valley below. Unnerved by her tension, he is taking her where he pleases. Adam and I go together awkwardly, but this doesn’t stop me imagining riding the entire race with him, conducting a dreamy love affair along the way. I still have a schoolgirlish ability to fall for men, even, and especially, when they have shown no interest—not one friendly phrase nor any eye contact.
We rise over a pass and creep along the high ground of a new valley. Prehistoric stone slabs jut out from the slope, casting themselves in long shadows. We find bones scattered among them and I reckon I sniff violence lurking in the earth. Perhaps this was a battlefield. Or a burial site? It might be the graveyard of Chinggis Khan—no one knows where he lies. He asked that everyone on the path to his burial be executed, and a river be diverted over his grave. He was buried with his horses. No great tomb, no palace, no trace.
The pony and I are getting on well, though sadly the partnership with Adam is crumbling. In the dip of a hillock, he shouts at me to halt the canter. I turn. He’s entangled in his backpack. I tell him he should not dismount to disentangle. Our ponies want to gallop up a storm and can’t be trusted.
“I will not be going to find your horse when it leaves us for China.” I hear my crisp accent as I tell him this. It’s not cool like his American one. My consonants are oh-so-entitled.
I mustn’t be condescending to Adam. It might put our unfolding romance in peril. He submits nonetheless, making do with holding the tangled pack in one hand and his reins in the other. A man aboard a horse is often a funny sight for me, and a man on a pony takes leave of comedy and enters the absurd. Ponies are strong enough to nimbly unseat even the muscliest of riders. It’s a quiet threat that seems to unscrew manhood with every stride.
We curve off the high ground and drop into an endless green valley, large enough to render us matterless. Clenched above my pony’s bouncing trot, I turn to Adam. His bright-red gear is a quick reminder we’re only pretenders. I’m certain he and I should have fallen atop one another in a bush by now, but instead he’s dragging like a mop, backpack held to his belly. My turning gives him an excuse to begin again.
“Can we walk the horses now? This backpack is killing me.”
I don’t know how to respond.
At home in Britain, people tend to appreciate sulk, and rain, but only as a baseline drone, rarely as drama. Adam takes no measures to restrain his pained expression, as if he didn’t choose to sign up for the race, but rather was borne into it as its victim.
We might be in pain, but we are not marooned at sea, or trying to live in the aftermath of an earthquake. The Derby’s ten days will be so few among the year’s three hundred and sixty-five. Do we not have this, a vague awareness of time?
I try to catch the giant, elastic journey and pull it back to just here, now, clip clop clip clop. For another hour we murmur along ridges rising into spindly rock turrets, and reach for ourselves down in the plains. This feels to me like some place across the river, across the boundary—not the middle of nowhere but the center of old dreams and unthought-of ideas.
The only gers we pass are piled with small white shapes, which are a mystery from a distance. As we near them the light lifts, revealing lumps of drying yogurt on the canvas roofs. Summer has brought in the animals, who in winter are too weak to be milked. Goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, cow’s milk, yak’s milk, and horse’s milk are all being churned up by strong August arms. We ride only geldings and stallions, the male ponies, because the mares around here are reserved for milking and breeding (in parts of eastern Mongolia, herders do not milk the mares but ride them instead).
We’re nestled into the leg when Lynne tumbles from the hills like a boulder. Adam heaves to another halt to redo his backpack and Lynne waits for him while I ride on with a group of riders we’ve caught up with. It’s possible she needs these minutes to calm herself. Her office-conditioned fretfulness is not going down well with her pony. Like any horse, he lacks speech and makes up for it with his strengthened sensitivity to the unseen. Where humans might fail to grasp one another’s inner workings, the feeling of rider anxiety is obvious to a horse.
Aunt Lucinda always talks about the horse’s seventh sense (she says people have six), which knows our emotion before we do. The unity with a horse, the very idea of the centaur, is a unity of minds. When a human is tense, the horse will flee—flight is, after all, the horse’s natural expression.
I cast aside my fantasy relationship with Adam and ride on with the new group through thick grasses. I am munching on my last Sesame Snap when Monde starts talking about “hanging right in the lowlands,” which leads to an extended navigational debate.
The night before I left Ulaanbaatar, Mum and I had an email exchange about snacks and alterations to our home. Everyone else is having light neutral colors all the same, then your explosion, she wrote. She was objecting to the cockatoos I wanted to paint on my walls. This she followed with capital letters, which were unreal to me, since she rarely shouts. DON’T EAT THE SESAME SNAPS SILLY BILLY NEED THEM FOR THE RIDE.
But of course I had. Ate nearly all of them out of boredom before start camp.
After the debate, the pack splits. I follow two riders towards the mountains, going as the crow flies, which is the GPS’s idea of a shortcut. Down the corridor of the land storm clouds are approaching. Our bodies beckon them to refresh our reptilian skin. I lapse into passenger-seat mode while Kirsten, an Australian who fainted at the doctor’s talk in Ulaanbaatar, does our navigating. She rises punchily to the trot while conferring with her GPS. I get the sense she’s uninterested in chat. I myself am sore, and very much done with this day.
The sky will break soon, and there’s no knowing where we’ll bed down. My bungee rope is at hand, which could result in a lovely night. For years I’ve been dreaming of sleeping beside a horse. They say that in the first year of the race, riders expected to fend for themselves, so they packed tents and stoves, clueless as to what lay ahead. How sad they didn’t know about my lightweight, tentless option. Starry nights tied to a horse’s tummy, laid down on soft grass. And as far as I’m concerned, there is only grass. Wolves, snakes, and mountain lions can’t eat me because I’m not yet aware they roam these parts.
The air is raw and wet. Kirsten slides off to don a rain jacket. There are no keys to this race, but Lucy did say never to get off the ponies between urtuus, unless they’re lame. Horses’ eyes miss nothing. The slightest crinkle of our rain jackets, and they’ll shudder, spook, and ping away. “The sooner you recognize you look like a hazard to them, the better,” Maggie had explained.
Without ado, Kirsten climbs back on. Her pony chuckles at me, too interested in his grass to sprint away. It darkens at 7 p.m. Thunder burgles the sky as we sweep up off the plains. When lightning vaults and releases indigo rain, I feel as though we’ve ridden into a washing machine. Ten seconds and I’m wet at the undersides of my skin. Hail arrives and pelts the horses. Mine tenses his canter and stiffens his ears as he advances through the ice bullets. I am pitched over his body like a tent in the wind.
We move into pixelated vision up the valley, whose dark-clouded end will lead to another earth. The only man-made furniture in sight is a lone barn. We head towards it, but the hail only pounds louder under its tin roof. The body beneath me cowers inside his coat heavy with water. I stroke his neck as we stare out
into rain—and then we ride on, curling our bodies against the teeth of the storm.
In the gulley behind the barn the ponies push their way through a barricade of giant stinging nettles, which reach through my jodhpurs to sting my thighs. They startle the pony, too. His back rocks in the walk.
When the hail recedes, Kirsten and Sandra, a ringletted blonde from France, huddle for discussion. I stand apart, superfluous. My best guess is we’ve been conjured into the beyond, untraceable. But there’s the flash, flash, flash of the satellite tracker on my chest, shipping our signals off every minute. It even has an SOS button for calling the paramedic, who’s apparently never more than a five-hour drive away. Via satellite telephones, the paramedic and crew receive our coordinates from headquarters in Ulaanbaatar. So we may be hidden, but there is mighty trace. I understand the organizers have chosen these mitigations because they don’t want us to die on the Derby. After all, we have paid to turn wild, and everyone would like us to return to tell the story.
I have a fear of being traceable. If others don’t have information about me, I feel more powerful, more free. I know that not being accompanied by their phone is, for some people, akin to leaving their mouth at home, but I would like to toss mine into a stream and leave it to live as a pebble.
Cantering out of the rain, I’m desperate for a wee. But I won’t get off because what if the pony vanishes behind my back? Two valleys over, we reach a peak surrounded by hills smiling through rainlight. A musky post-storm air drifts with a highland scent. Mist rises from the scattered rocks. We come to an ovoo, a shrine created with a pile of stones—this one wound with blue scarves in honor of the peak and of tenger, the sky. Shatra, a Derby organizer who lives between Hawai’i and Ulaanbaatar, says that in the old days, people would make ovoos to mark their journeys or places they had lived, or to warn others about dangerous areas.
Rough Magic Page 5