Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  Cars were what I had come from and what I would return to, but at school I already yearned, perhaps unlike my urban peers, for the time before tarmac began: when mud was truth and cities trampled by hooves and carts went dusty in summer, when you had to exert your body merely to get around—forced aboard a horse, or else onto your own two feet, to bare your face to the breaking sun and stream your cheeks through the air.

  Medieval history was one of the only classes I could concentrate in. An era pre-concrete, pure horse. No guns, just the chance to pull your brother’s hair out with your bare hands like Harald Hardrada did in 1054. I think the in-touch-ness of that past draws me. I remember getting obsessed at age eleven by a yellow T-shirt picturing a mountain of hay with boxers, underwear, and pitchforks strewn at its base, captioned Country Girls Do It in the Hay! I thought it was really fantastic. No civilizational distractions, just free bodies meeting at the earth.

  Being on a horse pulls you out of yourself and grounds you in the larger land. “Plug in,” Aunt Lucinda says, to get riders feeling the animal and earth beneath their seat bones.

  XXV

  At the road, a sign emblazoned with Cyrillic letters passes us into the next district. Some boys dissolve their soccer game and run towards us, dispersing like atoms. Stripes lifts into a gallop but a flint pile then forces him to walk and the boys catch up. They move in a silence broken only by the occasional shout. They’re throwing stones at one another. Or at us. I hold on to my smile, not believing they mean to attack the pony and me until a stone lands next to Stripes’s nose.

  He swerves and trips away over broken ground as rocks drop closer, the boys behind us now, out of vision and more sinister for it. Their arms are small but they hurl the stones far. I cling on as Stripes tries to quicken but trips, the ground too rocky for him to outrun the boys. How long will they chase? We aim for the wood in a trembling canter.

  When the rutted earth irons out, Stripes gains speed and we reach the trees, where a fir branch big as a mountain brushes my face. The boys disband. The pony walks on his tiptoes through the maze of trunks.

  The unwelcoming welcome of the boys on the plains felt familiar; long ago I grew used to my older brothers chasing me out of their games and calling me things. Shatra, a race organizer, says the boys were the kind of troublemakers one could meet anywhere. They might’ve noticed I was foreign and known the language barrier would stop me reporting them to their parents.

  Although it was a game for them, the moment leaves me thinking of myself as a body somehow foreign. In what terms should I threaten myself the question do I belong here? I think of us as riders, but we’re also brute tourists, and our synaptic coming and going may be problematic. On one level, we’re simply an influx of mainly white Westerners.

  I wonder what the herders think of the race. It must be a risk for them to hand over their horses, even if it means monetary income—their animals can be returned lame or exhausted, they can even go missing, and that may be why, as the race goes on, some will refuse when I ask for their fastest horses. Shatra says that despite the hard work, the herders tend to really enjoy being part of the Derby. They are excited to meet each rider—and I have felt this attitude of warm curiosity at the stations so far.

  Meanwhile, I begin to realize I can divide everyone I’ve ever met into people who think I belong and those who are less convinced—Dad’s friend who once announced, in his sundial garden, that I should become a nun, and his other friend who refers to me as Avatar.Go to your planet, Avatar, he signed off in the only email he has ever sent me. Honestly, none of the labels or names have much in common, which I take to mean I’m an anyone, just like everyone, living out my days in the nooks and crannies between the labels, appearing as someone different to each person I know.

  There are ribbons hung on some of the firs. Later I’ll see part of a car in a tree branch. Only in reading will I discover that each ribbon is a prayer to the tree’s spirit, or at least a passing gesture, and that Mongolians sometimes place car parts in trees to ensure against breakdowns.

  Stripes blows his nose at the torrents in the river. The corners of his eyes, which I catch sight of as his neck snakes this way and that, reflect the streaming water. I knead him forward with my calves and pelvis, pressing on his fear until he creeps onto the sleeping bridge.

  On the other side, I look back at the water and feel the urge to swim and for Stripes to plunge his frothy coat, but Devan is calling, ding-dong. We slog on. Later I will tell people I had none of my own desire to win the Derby, that I simply needed to stop Devan from winning. Yet mostly I am just going fast, as fast as I can now, and I’ve got no time to stop and question why I believe evermore in the speed. Maybe that’s the trick of it—the race has got me going so fast I’ve lost hold of my ducking-out technique. Like an adult who gets a job and forgets how to play.

  My father and his sister know the art of getting on with it. It’s locked inside their DNA. “Just do it,” says Aunt Lucinda—daughter of a military general who seems, somewhere since the onset of the commercial era, to have swapped his commanding lines for the Nike slogan—not forgetting her stockpile mantra for not-thinking, Crack on!

  Just do it! and Crack on! can be useful, but when they lean in for crescendo—towards success! victory!—I’m not so sure. Will a life obsessed by driving onwards and upwards have been worth it?

  A river runs blindly alongside our canter. Trees line the farthest banks. Are they birches? Poplars? Why do poplars like to grow in lines? Questions are my line of attack now. Answers, I’ve none.

  The astral plain stretches away in sandy browns. It’s vast enough for the whole globe to gather in. Should I stop riding and plant my hands in the earth? Declare something? My legs are stranded in stirrups, my mind in motion. This must be how it is, to be water in a river.

  Over and over I check the GPS, squinting at the sunlit screen, zooming in on my god: the arrow that indicates direction. I look up after one study to see an inbound silhouette, which clarifies itself into a boy aboard a pony. He holds a stick the length of a fishing rod. Perhaps they’re returning from herding cattle. We slow our horses to meet.

  “Sain baina uu,” I say, a simple hello, the best I can do. I feel the sunburn on my face as I move my nose up into the human world. Lone travelers over long distances move inside silences, silences packed with unspoken thoughts and secrets.

  We chatter. Not much sense is conveyed between my English and his Mongolian. Then again, even in English, I’m never convinced there’s an easy way of saying what I really mean. What was the language in which I first spoke to myself, and how hard did I have to work to translate it into English?

  He concludes with a cackle, and I with a snort. As I ride away I almost fall off with glee.

  At five o’clock the suits burst out in London town. White stones appear in the grass and I hold watch over them as we canter, hoping they don’t score Stripes’s feet. We only left the last urtuu an hour and fifty minutes ago and already urtuu 12 is in our midst, though not in sight. All I see is a singular ger, humming at the center of a solitude made obvious by the oceanic plain.

  Stripes drinks from the river, scrambles up the bank, and saunters over to urtuu 12. I lean back and gaze upwards, following the late sun’s rays down to camp, which is home to the Gankhuyag family. In front of me is Harry, the serious vet from Scotland.

  “Watch out, Harry, don’t come near me. I smell like a dying sloth.”

  “Are you ready for the heart rate?” he says, peering out of tinted glasses.

  I trot Stripes up, wary of my face again, and its potential expressions. Harry checks his teeth. As though we have time for dentistry, says Stripes, chucking his head back and forth in protest. No other vet has bothered with mouth inquiries.

  When I hear myself telling Harry I can’t stop to eat a meal, I’m alarmed by my rush. I ask him to take Stripes’s heart rate again. He huffs, thinking I’m too early, but it’s already 60. He moves over to assess the stock in
the back of his vehicle.

  “Do you want some crisps, Lara?” he asks, picking up an enormous orange bag and lifting out a singular crisp to crunch on.

  No time for paprika chips, thanks, Harry. I’m after someone from Texas, have you seen her?

  “Four or five hours ago.”

  Oh. I almost thought Stripes would zip us up to her side.

  The herder recommends a palomino who is grazing in human quarters with his back twisted like a turfed wheelbarrow as he reaches, one foot forward, for grass at the edge of the ger. I remark that he looks a bit fat, but the man stands firm—this is one of his old racing steeds.

  Minutes later, he windmills his arms towards a set of mountains and I climb up and into another departure. 5:45 p.m. If last year’s race length is anything to go by, Devan will cross the finish line in three days and three hours’ time.

  XXVI

  If a rooster crows on a cloudy day, the sky will soon be clear. If a rat whistles before it goes into its burrow to hibernate, it will be a warm winter. If a chicken stands on one leg in winter, there will be a strong wind. These are three things I will read about animal habits here, once I’ve left.

  The ground is teeming with singing hamsters. They dash away down holes ahead of the pony’s hooves. The bigger holes must be home to the marmots, though I never see them. They tend to come out in autumn, fat from summer, or so says my book on steppe wildlife. I imagine them rolling across the hillsides like fluffy footballs.

  Uuganaa Ramsay’s father has a special outfit for hunting marmots. He wears her mother’s old white dressing gown, a sun hat, and cream-colored shoes. Out he goes, waving a stick with a fox tail on it, walking on his toes, uttering marmot-like noises. It is beneficial for one’s health to swallow a marmot’s lung while its body is still warm.

  We remain on the same plain I entered last leg. A plain so vast it would be silly to carry on thinking we matter. The family at the urtuu we just left lined up to watch us gallop away, but we’ve since slid to at least six halts at river tributaries. I can’t work out how to navigate around the water so my new horse has to plunge on into each one, bringing my ankles in with him.

  A rider fifteen years my elder will later fall off in one of these rivers. Alex Embiricos is her name; it is printed in loud capital letters on the back of her helmet. I also recall strips of yellow on her clothing, a strength in fluorescence. At start camp she saw I’d forgotten my toothbrush and gave me one of hers. She had a tendency to hug competitors she had only recently met—including Dylan, the broken-ribbed South African she’s riding the race with. Dylan is also about to fall off, a gaffe that will force him to walk 8 kilometers in search of his pony, Custard.

  As we take up the ground, my horse tests it. Real bog in disguise or just boggy? Heavy current in the water? Deeper than it looks? Flints underground? Aunt Lucinda is in favor of letting horses work things out for themselves, rather than riding them on strides we’ve calculated for them. I’m a mere passenger at this point, surrounded by a thousand sounding streams.

  There’s a bridge 24 kilometers away we’re meant to aim for, but maybe we should forget it. The horse could probably swim across the direct route. Mongol cavalry had saddlebags made out of cows’ stomachs, which inflated during river crossings to help keep them afloat.

  The map book says two women at the next urtuu are Olympic judokas. I stretch my mind away from the steppe to imagine them fighting in an Olympic ring, having flown there in an airplane, and begin to find it surprising that I flew here myself. Like any human, I’m a traveler but I’m better suited to the gradual pace of footsteps and hoofsteps than the leaping motion of planes, which severs me from the land. I wonder if fast travel dilutes us somehow—we the Everywhere Generation, making ghosts of ourselves while young.

  In the months after the race I will have recurring Mongol Derby dreams. I write each dream down and let the collection fascinate me. One re-creates start camp, with the feeling of Mongolia mapped onto my home village of Appleshaw, where I fluster through dank cupboards in search of the old bungee rope. Another takes place in a dark moonscape, and another runs through Salisbury Plain. In one dream, we riders prepare and wait in an old Welsh house—lots of rooms, horrid baroque, long misty lawn, saddles lying dead.

  My dreaming mind is never quite able to re-create the Mongolian landscape. Yet I want to tell the story from out here, not back in Britain. Here, on the steppe, is an orientation that tears apart my mind map. It breaks the spell of space and family.

  Clouds are fogging the mountains and cooling the air. I throw passionate glances at my watch, which has resumed service. I must make it to urtuu 13 by 8:30 p.m. When the bridge rises to meet us, I’m flummoxed by its condition—gaping holes on the left and the far half falling down—but I saw a little car crossing it happy as a mouse five minutes ago. The pony marches over boldly, allowing his gaze to fall down the holes where water dashes westwards. It must be raining up in the valleys.

  The clouds are charging in as though there’s a sight to see in the soum ahead. We waltz round the town’s edge, past a tower and a petrol station. The map book says Battsengel, this soum, is a good stop for ice cream or Coke. I see the town as a temporary measure, a pause in a thunder roll. It is free of sound but for some barking. I imagine men drunk at tables inside after a good summer’s day of airag consumption, but maybe they’re out on the steppe instead. The tin roofs flap and the growing winds leave the land all shifting, all wandering. Only 13 kilometers to urtuu 13.

  It begins to rain. Every drop is a touch of here. Here you are, on this baseless barren plain. My skin forgives and forgets each drop until there’s a stream as relentless as the race itself, no distinguishing between the borders of my body and the downpour. Pony, I’d prefer your waterproof fur to these slippery sleeves.

  We pass a camp where women and children wave, buckets swinging from their hands. I think to myself that it looks like home. Wind and rain continue filling the plain. The weather whips my concentration away; for fifteen minutes I fail to check the GPS as the horse pushes our bodies across the trappy floodland. I look down to see we’re too zoomed out on the map. Pants. These tracks are wrong—they’re sending us out to sea. I am stupid and cross for it.

  I’m so used to spearheading forward that every stride back clicks double on my nerves. Then our path loses track of itself and we meander, searching for any path at all. Perhaps the riverbanks have burst. Something about the land seems to have changed, but I will not know to call it a “flood”—and give it the status of an event—until tomorrow when a vet asks, “Did you get stuck in the flood last night?”

  Mongolian myth has it that the world used to be submerged in water, us all a boundless ocean. In a nearby cave 2,260 meters above sea level, stones bear the imprint of sea creatures and marine vegetation. It’s a cross-section cutting sideways into the past. Looking back, I will see the Derby in such a cross-section, layered onto my London, Appleshaw, love and other lives—all mixed up, inseparable.

  I don’t know how long all this is taking, but I sense it’s lasting. I feel the evening flowing to the end of the year and back. A jumble of lines on the GPS have recorded our movement. We’re lost.

  I call us “we,” but he’s the soldier, hooves on the line. Maybe I should let the reins go and ask him to take over entirely.

  So where are we now? And where are we going. Home to Neverland?

  Does it matter where we’re going when we have no idea where we are?

  I look down at my watch. Just twenty minutes until the 8:30 p.m. cutoff. Tomorrow or next month, I will see the photos of this race and think I look very free. But I am tethered, tethered I tell you, on lines from A to B to C, and from C to Devan. If I was four or five hours behind her, now I’m at least six, probably seven. If the palomino and I keep meandering, Clare, Kirsten, and Chloe will soon reappear.

  I search the sinking plain for somewhere to stay. The minutes pile up, answerless. I feel the world collapsing slowly, like one o
f my failed banana cakes. A hoarse laugh shovels out of my throat and I begin, for some reason, humming “Happy Birthday,” the rain stealing each note. Then, as if it were all a lie, I turn to tears instead, sobbing a few breaths before reining myself in.

  Once, when Chinggis Khan was lost in the Eastern Xia, his army tried to drown a town by breaking its dykes, but they ended up flooding themselves instead. Was it karma? There’s an idea that the Mongols were barbaric and the Europeans were/are civilized, which is amazing given the latter were barbaric enough to win all the wars “civilization” demanded over the centuries. It’s true that Chinggis Khan’s soldiers sometimes wrapped people up in carpets and kicked them to death, but this was, I’ve read, a treatment reserved for nobles only. By what standards Europeans ever denounced him I don’t know.

  We trickle on back towards Battsengel and I still can’t see a place to stay. I talk as though I’m on the telephone, yet I’m thoroughly alone. Only the bungee rope pokes her eye out of my backpack, offering the services she’s been yearning to provide since start camp. Dear friend, I can’t sleep out here. The earth is a river, can’t you see?

  In her research on getting lost, writer Rebecca Solnit found that to cease being “lost” you don’t necessarily need to find your way, nor do you need to retreat or return. You can just turn into something else. Transform. Maybe the Mongols exemplify this: initially suspicious of walled housing when they arrived in Muslim lands, they eventually swapped their nomadic lifestyle for such homes, and married into the religion.