Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  Richard is leaning against a white picket fence outlining the ger, cloud-light shimmering on his forehead. I tell him the pony was really fast and jumped all the gorse bushes so I named him Steppe Orchid after Desert Orchid—Dessie—Britain’s favorite racehorse in the 1990s. In the moment, I’ve no idea it was Richard who steered Dessie to two of his Grand National victories; my choice of name is coincidence. Richard gives nothing away, moving on to talk of Devan instead.

  “She didn’t make it to urtuu ten last night. Must have camped out somewhere between here and there.”

  I laugh this statement away—too solemn, too much the point. I want to be uninterested in Devan.

  I stand back to take in Steppe Orchid’s head for the last time. Did he arrive in the world with all that love in his face, or has it fallen into place over the years?

  Four horses stand on the line, unready, untended, almost free. No knowing where the rest of the herd has gone. The herder says they ran far from the storm last night.

  Maggie the steward approaches and insists we have breakfast. In the ger, we eat slowly, like long-necked dinosaurs. The breakfast is fish from the lake. Fish is supposed to be poor man’s food—water mammals and fish are the lowest form of Buddhist reincarnation—but I find it delicious, and I love the damp smell. Maggie explains to Kirsten that the lakeside camps now attract tourists from the city, hence the lady’s expectation of payment at our night-stop. I feel stupid for having been unprepared for this and for failing to predict how our lack of language might cause messiness of this kind.

  When Clare and Chloe stumble in, I face my food. We say nothing about leaving them behind last night. Maggie reads out a message from the race chief in Ulaanbaatar. “Keep going, girls. You’re closing in.”

  Richard catches me laughing as fish flesh falls from my lips. Mouths grind. Minds boggle. A message from the outside world—I haven’t thought much of it. They want a more competitive race, but not with a giant leap could we pass Devan Horn right now.

  What is she like again? Sometimes she falls out of her stencil in my head.

  A few minutes into the meal Clare begins sniffling at my side. I see tears rolling down her cheeks. I’m bemused. Maggie tilts her head sympathetically, so I screw my face into a concerned ball.

  “What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine,” laughs thirty-year-old Clare through tears.

  “Why the tears?” asks Maggie.

  “I don’t know.” She laughs again.

  Being naive, I believe her. Aren’t we all crying with glee to have made it so far? That’s just how I feel. If I had Winnie-the-Pooh in front of me right now, I’d scribble, How the fuck did this happen to me? I’m doing so bloody well.

  Don’t swear, daughter, it’s not ladylike.

  So there’s a lack of horses, Clare is crying, and the clouds are close to landing. I slip out to the resting ponies and jump the picket fence back and forth while I wait. Neither Clare nor Kirsten is ready. They’re moving slowly this morning. How often we treat this ordeal as a race seems to be up to us. Quickly Chloe is on. We release our reins, yelling “Catch us up” to the others as the ponies hoist us away, galloping down onto the heaths by the foggy lakeshore. Richard’s jeep roves the cliff above. I feel the silent clicks of his camera slicing us up into rectangles.

  I want to rein the ponies in to preserve their energy. Chloe disagrees. If we fight with their heads and necks when they’re keen, we can unbalance them. So, faced with terrifying speed, we find ourselves at our most relaxed, letting the thunder whip through us. For forty minutes we bolt into mists, we to whom nothing else matters.

  On the lake’s northern shore, my cream-colored pony launches himself over a puddle. He is airborne for seconds, heart hurtling. Chloe yelps from behind, thrilled by the jump.

  Eventually I ask her about the matter on my mind. “Why was Clare crying, Chloe?”

  “She’s cracking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was miserable last night.”

  I shiver a little, relieved to be away from Clare. I find emotions contagious, swear I can catch them like flu. I’ve always been wary of upset and sickness. Aged seven, I dubbed people crybabies as though it were a life sentence and I winced in repulsion if someone missed school for sickness. I tried my utmost never to get ill and felt ashamed if I did. Although later on I faked sickness to save myself from days of school, I still had no empathy for the unwell and the upset. Clare has revealed the emotional hold the Derby has on her, and this has lodged me in a state of sickened shock. It will not occur to me to imagine how she might actually be feeling, or how I myself might actually be feeling. Such is the strangeness of my selfishness.

  At the end of the lake, the soum of Ögii Nuur draws us into her silence. Dogs roam the perimeter of town, corrugated-iron buildings line the open streets. The paint has been stripped away by incessant Siberian winters.

  Apparently the Soviets introduced the soums in an attempt to settle the nomads but had minimal success. Families tend to leave the soums for gers out on the steppe in summer, and some live out all year round. Now, in August, it feels as though a flood has swept through and carried life away.

  On the soum’s northern edge, Chloe stops for an emergency toilet break. I get off to hold her horse, who breathes peacefully into my hip.

  “Is anyone watching?” she whispers up at me while crouching. It seems unlikely in such a ghost town.

  “There’s a crowd the size of a football stadium eyeing you through the slats in the fence here,” I tease. “Hurry.”

  That sunless morning felt night-like, haunted, sinister. The wind grew wet and my pony tired enough that Chloe had to wait for us up a ridge. There was a dark cloud beckoning above her, and from that distance I got the feeling she could win, although we were still less than halfway to the finish line, with some unmouthable number of kilometers to go.

  Chloe was light-framed enough for the horses to carry her easily but she was also strong. She had led us on my fastest leg yet. Now I’d be slowing her down. I was warmed by her waiting for me—separation didn’t seem to have crossed her mind. I felt I’d entered an easy sisterhood, and for this I was unspokenly thankful. Many riders in her position, myself included, would’ve charged on without me, so used were we all to the jostling.

  When I reached Chloe on the ridge, she leaned over to slap my pony with her spare rein. “Choo, choo,” she told him, until we bowled on down the hill.

  In the following hour, Chloe dismounted often to go to the toilet—often enough for my palomino to keep up.

  “Think I ate too much fish,” she yelled back at me.

  Our pace slowed. I began imagining Clare and Kirsten catching us. Nothing is swift as thought—I felt it jumping through me. But riding in a big group just wasn’t efficient. It was a simple thought, and when it came, I knew the race had me.

  XXIV

  Raindrops are tapping our helmets when we catch first sight of urtuu 10. The ponies march with their heads tucked into their necks, resigned to the weather. No one greets us. The storm has sucked everyone inside.

  Eventually vet Helen emerges in a rain jacket that reaches to the ground. She speaks sentences simple and strong, moving her head on her neck certain as a bird. I tell her of the horse and the journey in a monotone, refusing to let the drama of the weather into my words. I want business as usual.

  For noodles, I take to the ger. Chloe goes to the toilet again. The weather has given everyone an excuse to slow down. And what, exactly, has given me an excuse to speed up? I open the shutters to a competitor within me who sits uncomfortably with my self-image of a sideliner unaffected by the fray.

  But our leader, she does need toppling. Somehow I imagine her with antlers now.

  Plus, the pain. It goes down my arms and up my legs. I want to finish. I want the pain to leave.

  When Chloe returns I assess her appearance. Her face is loosening. Her hair hangs wet and scraggly, falling out of the nea
t ponytail it held at start camp. Her jodphurs are muddy. Pooh to the pruned clothes and kit we thought would save us on the steppe. The weather isn’t watching. Something other than Gore-Tex is now in demand.

  The herder tilts his hooded head upwards, wishes us well, and ships us off into the slanting rain. Matching gray horses trot us into hills that are neither high nor majestic, but plump and green. The wind blows in the grass and at the rims of our jackets. The ponies aren’t fit but mine is faster than Chloe’s. She shouts forth route instructions. Our main question is left, or right? Nearing the mountain range, we need a decision.

  “I don’t know, Chlo. Left’s my lucky side. Let’s go left.”

  On the path thereafter, I go quiet and fall into the canyon of my head. This is the mind-set where the world has no hold of me. I think I mastered it aged four in Mrs. Davis’s music lessons. She called it daydreaming. Aunt Lucinda calls it being away with the fairies. The boys on the German exchange christened me Space Cadet. “You’re all over the place,” says Mum. Personally I like to think I can be terribly present.

  Maybe it’s fine to inhabit more than one space the rest of the time.

  The storm undoes itself as we round the mountains. We’re regaining momentum. I turn to find Chloe’s figure gone again. Does she have a bladder infection? I wonder awhile. She emerges round the hillside with her pony trundling behind her.

  “Sorry, just had to go again.”

  Chloe’s complexion is ghostly. Pale skin paled, blue eyes iced—even when the sun bursts out and lends the land a post-storm cleanliness. The horses have not been enthusiastic about our voyage, but they canter occasionally all the same. We worm on through valleys of delicate wildflowers, their fragrance rising at our sides, the young sun and the old sky.

  The climax of the leg came at a hilltop stop when Chloe threw up. Fishy matter landed with a pitter-patter. I heard it from ahead and thought, Oh shit. When she caught up, I was only concerned with the spectacle. “I’m afraid I missed it on camera. Can you pretend to be sick again?”

  There were chords of pain in her laughter. Still, she took a mouthful of water and spat it out for my film. I made a note to suggest to ABC Alex that he use it in the opening of his documentary.

  Dear Chloe, weak as water, stopped again on our next ascent. Her pony bent his head around to observe the dissolving lump riding his back.

  “I can’t carry on,” she said. “Can we just stop for a while.”

  I waited at her side until the expected took place.

  “You should go on without me,” she said. “Go find Devan.”

  My innards were screaming for me to gallop away and clinch our leader. Simultaneously I was struck by visions of misnavigating and guilt at the thought of leaving Chloe in this state. She looked as if she were banking on the world ending before she did. In the stillness I could feel the winds of Clare and Kirsten on our tails. What was the point in standing there? Stasis felt so wrong.

  I coaxed Chloe into standing back on her stirrups, where she braced herself for the sloppiest of canters. It wasn’t elegant but it was motion, which was all we needed. Twice she sighed on the brink of collapsing and my meager response was “No, no, come on let’s keep cantering.”

  I asked myself if sympathy was an art I had yet to learn or whether it was always an awkward, possibly ugly, thing, even when performed by experts. Chloe followed my hollow words until urtuu 11 was in sight, when her pony humped back into a short-strided walk.

  I trot into the embrace of Pete the vet. Afternoon sun is lighting up his rounded cheeks.

  “You doing really well. Really, really well.”

  He has not seen Chloe.

  There’s a congregation at the eleventh station, as though the neighborhood has heard about the race and come to visit—or just come to visit. The pony’s heart rate is 64. Quickly I give Oyuntuya, the interpreter, my usual line in English.

  “Can you tell the herder I want to ride a fast-strong-wild horse? One who will bolt all the way there, one who is badly behaved.” I allow the words out at a gallop without trying to sound too excited—I’ve been told overly embellished tones are suspicious in Mongolian. Though there are many different dialects, of which I might’ve heard only one, I never hear the language spoken loudly, and rarely with inflection at any point in the sentence—just a murmuring of throats, rough made smooth.

  We all turn when Chloe slouches into the station looking sadder than the Grinch. She swings off her horse and lands like a slinky.

  “Give me ten minutes” trails from her mouth as she disappears to the gers.

  A herder from the Ganbaatar family, the creators of this station, bends his arms across his baggy deel, leans his chin on one palm, and presses two fingers against his lips. He walks up and down his line of horses and around their backsides before holding talks with a younger man. They unknit a chestnut from the line.

  “Have you seen how green she is?” Pete returns from visiting Chloe and speaks at my ear. There’s a note of gossip in his tone. “She looks just like the doctor did when I had to put him on a drip yesterday. She can’t go on like this.”

  I’m keen to know where Pete buys his certainty. How do adults land on one voice and stick to it when all I do is accumulate them, my original voices multiplying whenever I hear new ones? Tomorrow I’ll be narrating the world to myself with a pinch of Pete in my voice.

  “You should ride on without her or she’ll hold you up,” Pete finishes.

  It’s a relief to have a third party propelling me onwards, keeping me from feeling guilty about Chloe, who at least will now be under Pete and the Ganbaatars’ care. I quake as I shift into lonesome mode, summoning the air around me for support as I run down to the line of gers and poke my head into two. I find Chloe lying in an empty third. She is placed centrally, appearing as an embalmed celebrity. I leave her be.

  Outside, a boy with thin legs is waiting to take my backpack for water-filling. I follow him to the ger next door, where his mother muffles me with offers of doughy bread, soup, napkins, sweets. Her encouraging noises, her tentative smile. I accept only a handful of sweets. Yesterday I might have sat around for a meal, but now I bear what I’d like to call the “responsibility” of chasing Devan. My adrenaline is spiking. I’m ready to run away from my skin.

  I put my foot in the stirrup to mount. No goodbye, no nothing.

  “Your bag is leaking,” says Oyuntuya, facing my back where my water pouch is.

  I notice I’m wet but I’m too close to leaving.

  “You can’t go four hours without water,” says Pete.

  Back down on earth, I unzip my pack and pull out the three-liter bladder. It spews water. I look up, clueless. A young boy with blushed cheeks stares hard at the bag as though his eye contact might fix it. A crowd is gathering. It takes me a moment to realize this might be because I’m now the chaser of the leader. My body feels important, but I don’t feel up to the task.

  A message speaks out of Pete’s radio: two riders are approaching the station. Clare and Kirsten. I duct-tape the hole and dash to the tent to fill the bladder a quarter way while Oyuntuya runs to her vehicle for a spare bottle of water. I’m grateful for it, knowing the bladder will run out quickly now.

  When I pull myself on again, I see the man from the Ganbaatar family broaden his face.

  “Tell her this horse will get her to the next station in less than one hour.”

  I hear this translated by Oyuntuya and half believe it, envisaging time itself speeding up, even though each leg normally takes at least three hours. Below me is a sedate creature whose snoozing ears drop sideways.

  “Choo choo!”

  Pony peels off his sleepy shell. Lickety-split, the urtuu falls into the land behind us.

  He’s in tear-away mode. The wind blows hard and blocks our ears. His legs throttle as if dying to catch up with themselves, hooves flattening thousands of grass stems a second. If I move my heels a millimeter he bolts harder, so I tense myself into stillness
and focus ahead of his arrowhead nose. He’s a madman awakened. I love it, him, his intention.

  I carry a backpack of bottles and worries: follow the road to the Tsengher Bridge, cross it, and follow the river to urtuu 12. Do it in an hour instead of three. Alone. It sounds so simple in the abstract.

  We cover the first 10 kilometers too fast. Stripes becomes the pony’s name because of the white stripe on his forehead, but I’m also thinking of Stripes, the Racing Stripes zebra who doesn’t fit in. That was the first film to make me cry; I watched it three times in a row on an airplane when I was ten. Stripes being bullied by the horses, Stripes meeting the horses at midnight to settle matters away from humans, Stripes entering himself into the Kentucky Derby despite being half the size of the horses, Stripes galloping into a tree in a race against the postman, splat. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  Meanwhile in the Ulaanbaatar control room, race organizer Katy posts a screenshot of our dotted map positionings, which I will not see until after the race. There is a rather excellent battle commencing up front. LPP looking strong, closing in.

  Dots can look strong?

  By the time the sun was engineering her way out of the day, the first trees of the race glimmered in the distance. I hadn’t seen a tree since Ulaanbaatar, nor touched one since I’d left home. In my head, trees on the steppe contained livestock-pillaging wolves, but they also lent me the idea that I’d soon be properly out of sight—even of the broader landscape. Just alone, with my four-legged friend. No facial gymnastics needed for approaching photographers or passing herders. I began to find a focus I can rarely locate in real life. Some torch within me came alight—a need, not just to beat Devan, but to amplify my insides.

  There was a road on the horizon line, a car droning by every ten minutes or so. Balanced on the back of a pony, I found the sight of machines moving round bends spectacular, even miraculous—the way they didn’t lean. As we neared over the next half hour, I could hear each engine slamming by. Such speed treated the space as empty. What the shamans knew before the twentieth-century physicists was that “empty” space is teeming with particles and waves of energy, spirits and ancestors, histories and happenings.