A skinny interpreter is slumped by the van’s door, watching the vet and the driver scooping mud away from the wheels.
“We were marooned here last night,” she says.
And did anyone hear me humming and crying?
As I ride on, the morning’s low sky leans on the memory of my upset—as if to say, Whatever was the matter, you old drama queen?
The pony trots up a bog hill, stumbles down, and climbs another. I pause on the peak and see a line of horses wandering up a distant crag, their manes swimming on the horizon. Sky-mountains-river are all touching—hills streaming into sky and sky pouring river and something filtering through the clouds that looks so much like light.
What shall I do with my childish urge to tuck myself up in the land, to breathe and cry with the grass?
Racing is abominable. And the pony goes on beneath me.
At urtuu 13, I don’t see any Olympic judo wrestlers. Only the vets are present and a bare presence at that, their swollen eyes straight from bed. The day is still early, unlit.
“Morning,” mutters Kim—the tall blond one—touchingly unexcited by my arrival. They’ve only cleared three of the thirty ponies for riding. I stare longingly at the twenty-seven I can’t have and allow a gray to be chosen for me.
Later Kim will tell me that on this morning I asked her to “find me a fast horse so I can catch that devil woman, Devan,” although I don’t like to think of myself as so explicit.
I lay my saddle on the ground to relieve my sore wrists and run to the ger, where I stuff my pockets with dried food, before sweeping back out into morning, still early, unlit. The wind swings through me as I stride back to my saddle, where Kim nudges my side. “Always good to see people from my tribe.”
All conversation now strikes me as distinctly random but this comment really forces me out to sea.
“Tribe?” I ask.
“We’re tall,” she explains. “Got to stick together or we get lonely, towering over everyone.”
“Like sunflowers,” I say, unsure where she’s coming from. I guess I do grow out from a pony like a Christmas tree from a shallow pot. And perhaps I hold my shoulders as though I’ve never been loved. I walk over to the horse line carrying Kim’s idea in my mind—I am tall and a little too much for myself, I am elsewhere. My soul has gone for a sprint in outer space and I am a shell, abandoned, gutted. Until I get onto a horse, or into a moment.
Olivier Costa de Beauregard, a twentieth-century French physicist, decided there was a four-dimensional world alongside us that was timeless—what he called “an elsewhere.” It might be where my scattered bits gather. Or else the physicist was talking about the world that shamans journey to for their spiritual work. Maybe all physics theories are, in one sense, just new descriptions.
Kim and the other vet, Tom, watch the gray buck and bolt me out. What is so enlivening? We’re no more than two creatures moving as one tiny sound.
Turns out they think I might overtake Devan on this leg. I’m unaware she slept at the urtuu with them last night. She is only an hour ahead of me.
The gray horse and I urge forward, parting the air as we go. When will we veer off course? As I watch the old centaur shadow mowing along at our side, I tell myself the route comes easily now. Mud snarls beneath the perfect grass.
For two and a half hours my focus is whole. He moves fluently and I note the quiet warmth of his company. You make no eye contact when riding, but we’re in communication, working a shared form like shoaling fish. Horses have always been siblings to me, pressing their noses against my back and breathing out winter breath, slowly trusting. From his silence and the morning I draw something, something like strength.
The bad weather forges ahead, divinity on the move. The place we come to feels near an edge, as if we’re about to fall from a person’s chin. Instead of loneliness, I feel loveliness. Everything in the hour is familiar. The pony hurries on beneath me, persuading his way into my heart.
At the farthest pitch of an undulating plain, we meet gray slabs sticking up from the earth. These are deer stones from Karasuk times four thousand years ago, offers the map book in the tone of a sightseeing tour. I don’t bother to admire these Bronze Age stones or note their ability to live so comfortably idle all these years, but when I read about them later, I am endeared by their not-seeking my attention. I look back certain that if you were searching for ways to fall in love with the world, to hug it deep and clean, you could do worse than drape your form over a stone and listen seriously to its silence.
Had we veered closer, we’d have seen the carvings of graceful deer on each plinth, their snouts elongated and their antlers swept back. Other creatures feature too—horses, moose, leopards, tigers—but none tame like dogs or cattle, perhaps because they don’t retain the same spiritual independence.
We trot on towards a little boy perched on a big pony. His head leans into his chest, his eyes are large, and his grin wide. He turns to ride next to us until we near the gers of the fourteenth urtuu, when he trots an imperial circle and returns to our side, all the time talking. The tiring pony beneath me perks up and pulls faces with his horse. I watch them push their ears towards each other.
Do you find yourself searching for the meaning of life?
No, not really. I mean, what’s the point when we’re already full of it? You gotta live before you know the reason why, tralalala.
I follow the pony’s lead, chattering and nodding agreement with the boy in some language beyond words. Researchers say communication among horses has barely changed over 45 million years and yet we humans, only a few hundred thousand years old, have already let our language divide into thousands of different tongues.
On the sign-in sheet at urtuu 14 Devan’s signature is above mine, as it has been for the last three stations. I look at the times logged by the interpreters. She only checked in and out one hour ago. I thought I’d been reeling out again, but really I’ve been closing in. How my spirits lift! I berate myself for letting the news excite me. All said and done, I am yoked to moments.
Rumors about Devan have been circulating among crew members and competitors. They say she has packed enough American food to survive and declines Mongolian culinary hospitality. At urtuus she draws out fluorescent sachets and sucks the goo into her pursed lips. A friend from home has found her blog, which reveals she’s sponsored by “pure, natural energy gels.” Apparently, she calls herself Texan Temüjin, which is Chinggis Khan’s birth name. It sounds like she’s relaunching the empire in her head. My friend writes a message I will not see. You are catching up with Devella Deville—if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.
XXIX
Urtuu 14 lies at the westernmost point of the course. Now we head north, and later back east. Our route will draw an unfinished circle. They say the Olziibayar family has the wildest ponies of all twenty-five stations. The course organizers try to find them every year, no matter where they’ve migrated.
I barely pause at the station. The scent of mutton holds the air. Time for lunch? Woof. I’ll wait. The mounting process is operatic. An old herder draws out a dark dun—skinny body, strong neck, black mane sprouting. The other ponies’ manes have been bristly-short like toilet brushes. I think they chop them off the geldings. This one must be a stallion. Just like in the UK, the horsemen here tend to believe that the really important things—spiritual qualities, character, and stamina—are passed on by the stallions rather than mares, although that view is changing.
The herder grips the bridle from aboard another horse while his tiny son plants himself ahead to stop the pony from shooting off, bouldering his hands into its shoulders. Contact. I am strapped into my new home. The herder holds his bridle tight to his knee as we zip out onto the steppe.
Moving across a plain blanketed with sage, the old man speaks occasionally though I don’t know with what intention. What are we saying with our faces before we open our mouths to speak? All our delicate muscles, erecting, twitching, collapsing
like tents.
His eyes glint and I trust him in this. As we shuttle along, he teaches me how to hold the reins in his way. It makes me think of all the sports and skills where masters teach you how, commanding until you repeat back their methods with ease—and maybe you grow hopeless in it, because you spit like a cross llama when someone tells you what to do.
This is a rare instance of instruction. No one has told me what to do since I arrived in Ulaanbaatar. I try to find sense in the old man’s chants. I feel so foreign trundling on the earth beside him and yet he brings me closer to a there-ness in the landscape, to the rhythmic cycle of seasons all missing from a ten-day race.
After fifteen minutes the old herder points me in the direction of a mountain and releases my pony from his grip. Beneath me a lion takes flight. When I look down at the GPS, the dun pony—The Lion—steps up another gear, attacking the air ahead of his nose as though determined to blow out all the candles on his birthday cake.
The basin ahead is vast as an airport runway, traveling out in changing shades of brown and green. I expect us to pass through alone, although a dot—I don’t know what—hovers in the hazy distance. It increases in mass while I tussle with The Lion, who is begging for a bigger gallop. What will we think of each other, scapegoats in the wilderness?
I’ve earned a semblance of control by the time the identity of the pink dot is clear. She’s our leader. Striding towards us, horseless. Well, hullo there, Devan Horn of Texas, in your hot pink Gore-Tex jacket, and your lime-green neoprene chaps. This is the voice I imagine they’ll use for the ABC documentary.
Where has she come from? Coughed up by the land? Hopped out of my ear? She’s walking in the direction of urtuu 14, where I’ve just come from. I slow the pony as I shout through the wind, reminding my mouth that it is indeed a mouth. “Wow, are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she replies.
The Lion is carrying me away.
She yells after us, “I’ll catch up with you in a second!”
Given she’s on foot, this is an amazing idea. Her tone is upbeat but there’s no smile in her face. A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!—the sentiment may sit in her throat.
Chloe and I were convinced we’d never see Devan again, so far into the lead had she flown, so convincing were her winning words at the outset. I think the herder—he was trotting leftwards at last sighting—must be riding after the pony she fell from. It is easier, goes a Mongolian proverb, to catch an escaped horse than to take back an escaped word.
We bowl on. The Lion wants to break into a gallop. I hold him in an oozing canter. On the spread of the steppe I’ve grown used to feeling like an ant making her way through honey. But this horse’s movement is aqueous, the land doesn’t resist him. There’s a wholeness to his wildness and our going together feels prehistoric. He is free from history, free from country; he doesn’t care about the Mongol Empire, nor any empire.
For all the empires horses helped to build, and all the land they captured for us, what they really invoke is an opposing set of forces: fleeing, giving away, leaving behind.
I am enough as I am, says the horse to herself.
In The Tempest, Ariel, a spirit, sings about a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. He’s describing a transformation beyond recognition. With The Lion I feel reincarnated into some such something. I’d like to ride this leg on him forever.
We have a new leader, broadcasts Katy in Ulaanbaatar. It’s freeing to be out in front, though somehow it hurts to celebrate. Soon I’m a fretful leader, certain I’m the next line in the Bottle on the Wall song. “And there was one green bottle, sitting on the wall . . .” I will accidentally fall.
Flashes of pink blink in my mind. I check for variations on Devan behind me. I’m sure we dart out of her sight at every corner. After ninety minutes we’re at the foot of a mountain so enormous it must have made many a passerby scowl, but not The Lion. He insists on trotting up the steep, stony trail with his head held high. In every hoof-plant he punctuates the ascent, but the sentences he places in my brain are contrary to that power I see in him. I am not energized by myself alone. I am married to the spaces we sail through.
I’m wary of his speed and my luck. “Sit back!” Aunt Lucinda shouts at riders when teaching. “The most dangerous thing you can do is get ahead of the movement.” Devan can’t be the only rider to have pictured herself as leader. Clare, Kirsten, Chloe, Matthias, and Paddy all seemed to live in the hope. It’s odd to think of them now, and of those who lent me their kit and lathered me in advice at start camp. They must think a miracle lifted me to this position. Myself, I can’t tell what has happened.
The northern face is bright green. If eating grass were my habit, I would dine here. But The Lion harrumphs, showing no interest in the Michelin-starred plant life or in the water. Little trees lean off the mountain. He canters me down through them, holding his tongue while I lower my head and fall into his silence. How is he so merely himself? Himself in all his blatant being.
Baska the vet is casual, calm as usual. Only Devan-paranoia haunts my peace. I inspect the horizon beneath the mountains, questioning the woods in case she’s disguised herself as a tree.
I cast a look to The Lion as he’s led away to the lines. Thank you for flying me, for bettering me, for allowing me. But retrospective gratitude doesn’t work with horses. You just have to behave according to the social contract while on board. Hopefully, I did. Fixed in momentum now, I don’t pause long to think of how I’ll never see this pony again. As I turn away my mind pulls a plug, which lets him leak through a hole. But shortly after I move on he’ll still be somewhere, pushing the world around under his hooves.
One strand of Mongolian philosophy has it that my chest, not my brain, is the seat of my consciousness. It contains my hiimori, my wind-horse, an inner creature whose power needs maintaining. When you rub a racehorse’s sweat into your forehead or ride a great, quick pony, you strengthen your hiimori and improve your destiny.
In the ger I wait for water. Meats—body parts—hang from the rafters. Baska talks through the interpreter to tell me he’s pleased I’m winning. Then I find him outside a minute later, puffing on his cigarette with detached passion.
At the beginning of every new leg, I notice the weather. This time there’s sarcasm in the sky. I see the face of a very human cow staring from one of the bigger clouds. I am frustrated with the clouds, perhaps because I know they wouldn’t react if I touched them. And they’re so far away.
I’m slung onto an ordinary, hairy beast and it all feels like a chore again. My stomach is brittle. The Lion, my last pony, took me north after much westerliness. We’ve now turned east. I don’t like going back the way we came, back towards the city.
After twenty minutes, the new horse and I come to a soft river where naked children splash their mothers and beckon for me to join. I eye the river up to where it folds back into the mountains and feel it hang from my neck. Water, darling water. My clothes are saturated in sweat but there’s no time to stop. The children prance after us, screaming as we pace on up the hill.
Particles of Devan waft through the air. I check the land behind us. It’s too much like a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps in the garden, with all that pure young fear gripping me again. At school they really encouraged “creativity” and “imagination,” as though the imagination wasn’t a rotten thing in which you could ensnare yourself.
Miles of strides pass. My other main sentiment, besides a fear of being caught, is profound boredom. It may be a symptom of landscape ignoramia, which involves disconnecting from your surroundings. Lucy did say on the telephone, “You won’t expect this, but you’ll also get very bored.”
“Isn’t the steppe beautiful?” I’d said.
“Yes, it is beautiful, but after the first day you won’t notice that. You’ll spend every remaining minute checking your GPS.”
Some people like a very boring landscape. A subtle desert, a half-hearted hill. Litt
le rock there, little bush here. Little rock there again, little bush here again. A series of dull repetitions for anyone who takes pleasure in regularity.
Children never seem to remark on the view. It’s as though they have priorities closer to hand—admiring the beauty of distance has no practical use. Maybe they also feel so much a part of the land that they wouldn’t think to separate themselves from it in order to make comment.
I should spend time singing to ease the boredom but there’s no one around to annoy. I used to spend whole afternoons on the rocking horse in Appleshaw, keeling back and forth as I sang out the sentences from a random page in a book about Wales.
Mongolian ballads known as “long songs” are said to translate the contours of the land into verse. If the steppe had a tongue, these might be her sounds. Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar, a famous opera singer, says being with his family on the land is what gives him inspiration. “Wherever I am, the land is what I imagine when I sing.” He grew up riding 100 kilometers a day.
By the time the sun suggested departure, casting thicker light on the highest mountains, the pony was tired of me. Be off my back, he snorted. Occasionally I slapped his shoulder for a canter and received a lapse into walk. The average speed of a Derby leg is 11 kilometers per hour. The Lion must’ve gone twice that fast while this next horse dribbled along at about 5 kilometers per hour.
We passed a camp of lonely gers and animals gone stale in the sun. The hills kept coming, rising like bread. The horse, who cantered on his forehand, descended each one in a sprawl. In the plains beyond, there were more carcasses than usual. Lives leaped from the bones and all the horses of history danced by my eyes.
I’d seen Devan toppled, but it hadn’t relaxed me at all. If this was a game of Snakes and Ladders, I remained convinced, like every paranoid world leader, that I was about to slip down a snake.
Rough Magic Page 15