Some of the Derby legs fade in my memory. The leg to urtuu 7 felt distant, impossibly far from home. We roved through a hilly side country I found underwhelming. The pony below me, who I noted later as 7: the slow-canterin’ chestnut, seesawed on one leg while my right knee loosened, and Kirsten’s pony acted as though he’d never been ridden, offering, in the spirit of an insect, a series of jumps sideways.
We dodge herds of nibbling goats whose heads are tuned into some conference inside the earth. I sense their disdain for our motion, the way we pass them fast and carry on just as fast. Oh but who am I to feel the judgment of a goatherd? I try talking to Kirsten, expect some revelations, and receive none. Maybe it’s just an English thing, wanting to harvest background. Neither Kirsten nor Devan has been interested in me. I’m not sure I’d have much to say for myself if they were, but the conversation feels imbalanced when I’m asking all the questions.
Maybe I’m disappointed because the rocking backs of horses sustain a rhythm suited to long and searching conversations. On the rare evenings she was home and I was in Appleshaw, Aunt Lucinda and I sometimes rode together. She would let her reins drop and begin conducting her hands to accompany her words, which she spoke at twice the beat of her horse’s walk. Often she tried to diagnose the world, or diagnose me, forcing cold moments of questioning.
If I ever gathered the courage to question her back, she tended to deflect, as though rebounding from acute pain. Whether this was to compensate for years of nationwide attention or simply a result of her war-era parents persuading her never to talk about herself, I can’t tell—she remains emotionally undeclared. Alcohol is a rare subject on which she’ll reveal herself. She hates to drink, says “I can’t bear the feeling of being out of control.”
As for Kirsten and me, we manage one exchange in the hour.
“So, question: How many hamsters do you reckon there are in Mongolia, Kirsten?”
“Oh, crikey. A billion?”
“No! Really, five hundred million.”
The discussion rumbles and fizzles out into the scuttling hooves beneath us.
Later we show the horses to a stagnant water hole. Flies buzz, hardly flying, as though they have come for a party and found its atmosphere unexpectedly grave. I take the pony through at a trot to splash his coat. Kirsten follows suit.
At a certain dip in the hour, Georgie’s snorting horse gallops in and tanks her up the hill ahead.
“Hallo!”
Additional words fall back, unable to form at such speed. Kirsten and I push for a canter to keep up but our ponies can’t match Georgie’s pony. Kirsten curses hers as he moves sideways, all the way up the hill. Meanwhile, my thumb and knee are wailing their way through an opera. My brain reminds itself that pain is created and all we must do is puff it out. Be a good chimney.
When we descend a sandy track on a plain streaked with grass, I feel we might be nearing the station, though Kirsten says we’re miles off. The clouds have arranged themselves in dancerly fashion, like Arabic script, and the sky looks as if it could be a map of the world. Beyond us a figure is striding out of his ger towards a singular horse. From this far away there’s room to remember that the land he marches neither begins nor ends. He doesn’t own a specific bit of it.
There’s no land ownership on the steppe, since the earth isn’t for sale; by contrast, every patch of England seems to be buyable, even some waterways. Ibn Khaldun, historian of the fourteenth century, felt nomads were “removed from all the evil habits that infected the hearts of settlers.” He might’ve deemed the right to buy property one such evil.
Farther into the basin, I rub my sweaty eyelids at a sight across the way: three horses and riders, peeling the hill in their coming, striding to the tempo of the sky-high afternoon. They turn out to be Georgie, Clare (another British rider), and Kiwi Chloe. They have entered from the wrong direction. They must’ve been lost in the hills. How else have we caught up astride our sideways clowns? Three cheers to Kirsten for navigating.
Only Devan’s ahead of us now. Clare and Chloe say they haven’t glimpsed her since the start line two days ago. She hovers as a faceless snowman in my mind, sinister, stuck. Stuck in the lead.
The smell of animal dung hangs in the air at the seventh urtuu. Sun plats the surrounding hills; the brightness is striking. Charles, the steward in his early thirties, rules the roost, while Richard stands on a spot of stale earth, swatting the heat, his camera apparently exiled to his jeep. I pull the pony into trot, fearing he’ll look lame on the hard ground, but the vet decides he looks fine. I slump to a relieved halt to wait for his heart rate to drop. Sweat drips from my helmet onto the tip of my nose.
“If you want his heart rate to drop, walk him up and down into the wind,” says Charles, rocking from foot to foot.
The authority in his tone surprises me, and I’m unsure why he’s helping. Only now can I place his accent as South African. Kirsten says Afrikaans is his first language and he doesn’t really like speaking English. Apparently he won the race in its first year, alongside Shiravsamboo Galbadrakh, the only Mongolian who entered. Addicted to the steppe and the strangeness of the race, Charles returns annually to steward.
I ask him if I can borrow some toilet paper but my appeal is met with a glare. I traipse on with the pony, looking down at my thumb. It’s red and warm after the fall from Barbie. Laughing bones. I seem to have so many.
Something about the middle of the race—its heat and how unshapely it is—creates in me an apathy as we judge the next horses. Tiny but brilliant, Barbie denied nature’s conformation rules. I can no longer use a horse’s appearance to forecast how it will go. Two men from the Damdinbazar family allot me the “best horse at the station,” who we’re saddling together when Undrakh, an interpreter with a city-style Mohawk, sidles up to me and hands over a roll of loo paper. “Please return it,” he mumbles. I see Charles looking over at me (Oh! the romantic tension), and extend my stride to the toilet.
I haven’t mentioned that I need the paper to stop my blue jodhpurs from going purple, but as of this morning I’ve been bleeding onto the saddle. I forgot to take any of the pills that keep my period away. Its arrival strikes me as odd, perhaps because I feel the Derby has suspended ordinary life’s monthly cycles. If it’s true that periods rarely arrive in times of uncertainty, then this might mean I’ve relaxed into the race. Surrendered myself to its form.
I’m two steps from mounting when Charles makes another announcement to us.
“You can make it to urtuu nine today.”
I look down at the time, alarmed. Two urtuus in six hours? The legs have been taking four hours each. We can’t expect to reach urtuu 9 until tomorrow morning. Devan trots through my mind with her head held high. So goes the Mongol Derby press release: The way she’s riding at the moment she’ll be very difficult to pass, but you just never know.
Charles walks forward to my next horse’s shoulder. He places his hand on the mane and looks up at me with furrowed brows. “You’re on the best horse here.”
I can’t get my head around this outburst of belief from the aloof steward. If only I were in a historical flurry with some scroll to be delivered to the Caspian Sea by midnight, this would no longer be silly, no longer be sport.
The Khangai Mountains are coming, says the map book, which alternately presents helpful and useless information. Keep an eye out for the very beautiful woman living at urtuu 11, it says, a few pages ahead.
Tsendiin Damdinsüren, a twentieth-century Mongolian poet, wrote about these mountains in winter.
Girded in a mantle of white,
Glistening in a cap of snow,
The Khangai range is bridled
By a blue ribbon of ice-cold rivers.
I can see their surfaces dry in the distance, while towards my right ear Kirsten and Clare are hurrying out of camp in the wrong direction. I shout them back and they relaunch ahead of me. When I catch up with Clare, she is bent to the ground beneath her jittering pony.
>
“Dropped my GPS! Thought I might as well pee whilst I was off.”
Clare is about to get married. Being from the same country, we interact as though we’re already acquainted. Her gear is emblazoned with sponsors’ names, from horse-feeding companies to an insurance broker.
“I’ll be really trying to win,” she told an equestrian magazine before the race.
In the pause while I wait for her to finish peeing, I glimpse my own condition—a string of petty aches from my bunions upwards.
Kirsten and Clare canter up the hard, steep mud towards the crinkled ridge. Their ponies’ hooves make hammering sounds.
“Shouldn’t we walk up here?” I ask behind them.
No reply.
“Do you think we should walk up here?”
Still nothing. I slow Best Horse to a walk and watch them haul up and out of my vision.
XXI
Left alone on the eighth leg of the race, I’m giddy at the thought of navigation. I pull over the brow into a sphere of rolling mountains and frown at the terrain for the energy it’s about to suck from my pony. I’ve no longer any words for the land, though the view ahead is one my parents might classify as “beautiful,” “glorious,” or “quite spectacular,” as if the landscape were an ornament created for human commentary.
Half an hour after being left behind, the pony and I follow two distant dots that appear and quickly disappear on the horizon. I assume them to be Clare and Kirsten, though to be honest there’s no way of telling they aren’t two married goats on an afternoon honeymoon. When the dots lead us too far to the left, the GPS, in a rare moment of devotion, corrects us before damage to the route is done.
Leaning off the sides of hills, we pull forward, feeling very alone, as if we’re the last drops at the bottom of a wine glass. On the one hand, the pony’s laissez-faire attitude makes for soothing company; on the other hand, we’re barely halfway to the next station. When he’s had enough of trotting, I call him a banana and I tell him he’ll make me cry. We’re the last of the chasers, can’t he see? He pricks his ears. Urr biyiig zovoono, uul moriig zovoono. A proverb from western Mongolia. Anger wears down the body, as a mountain wears down a horse.
On we graft through valleys of sadness into a sedate evening sky. Twice we walk high in the center of a goat herd. Their eyes stare through us. I try not to care that we’ve fallen behind, yet I care ever more. I decide I was never meant to last long with the leading riders, but when we come out of the mountains onto a track, I push the pony, whom I’ve taken to calling Best Horse. You must keep cantering. That was Kirsten’s advice.
He doesn’t seem tired, only exceptionally grumpy. Me, I’m the same—what failed hope, what undone legs. Not long ago I was high on the excitement of the urtuu, now I’m just a frustrated cabbage, earnestly upset. This pendulum of emotions must be the joke of the human, but never before have I felt it so condensed, and rarely so convincing.
How the last kilometers stretch out so far, I do not understand. I let my head rest carelessly on my shoulders while Best Horse’s ears go on ahead of me like two creatures twitching with laughter. Our slow evensong pace is un-racey. Aren’t you lucky you don’t have to go the whole thousand kilometers? I ask him, not wondering how he might feel to have been coopted into my ego. I get the ABC recorder out to continue my monologue. I feel this camera and I are friends, though that may just be because I’ve turned it into a receptacle for all my emotional debris.
A large herd of sheep canters into a cluster away from us. “I believe I might get there quicker on board one of them,” I say, before closing the camera flip screen. Why are people always insulting sheep? London used to belong to sheep and shorter things. What does it mean to be sheepish, really? This horse I’m riding is sheepish. Wants his herd back.
It’s funny to think of London out here. Suppose it’s all I have to fall back on. I have this idea that it’s my friends whose compasses center on London, but the city seems to have become a part of me too, accumulating affection for herself in the manner of an old wart. All my journeys within her skyline—I didn’t like them but they happened to me, in the way fields happen to horses, and I feel no need to resent them anymore.
The Mongols who made the empire were supposedly a people without even a fixed town to their name. They didn’t need to stamp the land with grand buildings. Anne Carson writes: “Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow.” Even Aunt Lucinda’s sport, eventing, happens in purpose-built environments, parklands designed by historic landscapists like Capability Brown, then molded again into courses for horses. This race dangles well away from that realm. Nothing has been shaped, little mapped—the valleys are splayed out, and we are undefined.
Six o’clock. Best Horse and I wiggle our way up a weedy hillock into urtuu 8. No hope for urtuu 9 before 8:30 p.m. Maybe the others will make it.
Yet I spit shock. They are here. Kirsten, Chloe, and Clare flow around the gers, seasoned postal riders that they are.
The convergence of Cs and Ks is confusing even to me. Chloe is the Kiwi who taught me a rabbit song at start camp. Her face has been made gaunt by the race, or maybe it was already so. She’s older than I am but younger than the other two. Clare is the British one with sponsors and a pink bobble on her helmet. And Kirsten’s Kirsten.
I presume their ponies bolted for too long at the start of the leg, which allowed Best Horse, who never bothered exerting himself in the first place, to catch up. I glare at his bottom as a boy leads him away. How slow he made the afternoon. My face is frozen into a scowl, colored orange by the late sun. Richard is trying to take a photograph. He tends to catch me grinning, as though the race is a never-ending pleasure. Around now I start forgetting to smile.
Baska the vet is quiet. He seems to let the sun go easily. Beside him I feel daft about my little tantrums on Best Horse. I’d like some of his underlying contentment. Where is my silent laugh? My droning “It’s fine”?
“It’s fine” comes from Mum. It’s one of her main phrases. She utters it often to her children with her voice lowered. I think of it as the warrior in her, running parallel to her worries.
Urtuu 8 is a springboard into the next leg. It leans down the hill, horses ever lower on the line.
“I would love your fastest, wildest pony. The one that will gallop all the way, that will buck and bolt. The one with most life.”
The interpreter translates in fewer words. I don’t even look at the line of ponies. I’ve a new faith. Oh, won’t the herder sympathize with the distress in my eye and the passion in my voice? The sun is setting. I am in the mood either to begin a mission or to end one.
Two tall men saunter into the bunch of sleeping ponies and draw out a chestnut. I’m careful not to share my skeptical feelings. I see a shirtless man stride past me with his tummy wobbling. His mustache is perfect. His shoulders are sunburnt. I think he will mount before I do.
In a relaxed haze, he pulls himself onto the unsaddled horse. His friends have turned to watch. Without stirrups he won’t be able to grip if the pony bucks. The invention of the stirrup was pivotal for war riding. Soldiers could suspend their feet on platforms on either side of the horse’s barrel, leaving their bodies free to swivel with the lance. This made them less likely to topple off while fighting.
The pony trots the topless man in large circles. People have closed into a crescent formation around him—many hands on hips. I watch the rider’s tummy shaking in belated rhythm to the trot, then I peep at Richard to my left, scanning him for signs of approval. The animal is fluid in motion, but I’m upset he hasn’t yet bucked.
After all their efforts in choosing, I can’t be fussy. One man is nodding before me, another is tacking him up. I sprint up the incline to fill my water. I find Chloe marching back to the lines, her hair hanging heavy. She shouts that she’ll wait for me if I don’t stop to eat, so I take only water. It streams from a can at the hands of a crouching lady, whose eyes I feel following my form as I run back to th
e horse lines.
Before I’m fully on, we’re off, off across the grass, away, away from home where my family must be stuffed in for sofa-breakfast, arguments flying like feathers. With every galloping horse I get farther away. There’s no denying I believe I’m coming closer to something, too. I don’t think it’s the finish line, though that’s somewhere on the list. Nor does it seem to be Devan, who is, of course, still in the lead.
Temul. It’s the Mongolian word for the look in the eye of a horse charging down its own undrawn route. Nothing slows him, this new horse I’m riding, not even a pit of rocks. There must be a clot of oats in his brain. I’m temul as much as he—no idea where we’re meant to be going. I fix my knees and pull him up. We wait for the others to catch us. Kirsten shuffles in aboard a horse full of sweat and asks him for canter. “Choo choo choo choo.” My pony overhears. Again we are pounding.
His determination to hurl on through air is without reason. This I love. His ambivalence towards the marmot holes, I like less. But it lets me forget the competition. Makes me remember I’m here for the motion, the thrill, not the thought. His speed quells my desire to sleep.
When Secretariat won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by thirty-one lengths, he reignited the question of why horses race. What made him push himself faster after overtaking his rival, Sham, early in the race? Horses often strive to get ahead of their field, but it seemed Secretariat kept speeding up just to see what he could do. Why do we push ourselves? Perhaps not for competition, but for our causeless passions. A friend of mine says she just wants to hit a good badminton shot to “break through” herself.
The chestnut pony gallivants us into a chapter of grass, lush and smooth, boasting its basic facts: greenness, the willingness to wilt in the wind and rise again soon after. Resilience in each streak. I want to pat it all. Green is an unlucky color, according to my mother’s imaginary handbook. Elsewhere it has come to symbolize all manner of goodness: resurrection, immortality, healing, and liberty—the breaking of bonds with the earth: flight. Lo, I have created the horse, says God in one translation of a Bedouin text. I have molded it from the wind, I have tied good fortune to its mane. It will fly without wings. It will be the noblest of animals.
Rough Magic Page 10