Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  And wow, how I go at it now.

  I am racing for the finish and racing for something else, a thing that changes with the wind, a thing I may never know nor think nor really see, only circle around, like a startled horse inspecting a coiled snake.

  We move fast. I can’t spot Devan in the textures ahead. Behind the hills are miniature rivers tickling one big river. We wriggle across tributaries, fall through bogs, the thickening air, the smell of sage, the sweat lathered white against his black-coated shoulders. Beyond the waterlands a blue sky widens. I check my GPS. Follow me, the arrow commands, and I do because in the sunlight I can’t see the screen’s more subtle shading, which illustrates hills. You twit, the eTrex will later say, for believing my arrow.

  We trot across the flats for 5 kilometers. The pony stops often to drink. This is the oven of the midday steppe. I hear the heat oozing out of the day. At the end of the plain, he ceases to be his lightning self. The hill ahead is much higher than it appeared from the river—more like a mountain, in fact. How it fooled me. How most things fool me.

  I wince for the weary being beneath me. He scrambles us up the slope of dread, trying his best. Sweat crawls farther into my eyebrows. We see mountains at the top, so many mountains. I want to scream them into flatness. I’m a devout follower of tracks—I am, I am—but the tracks head right and the station is left, beyond a set of reckless young cliffs.

  Chomp. I bite the air. I let us go down, he stumbles, so we go up, and it’s too vertical. We stop, it’s too angular. The slates below loosen. Any second I imagine being poked off the mountainside with the flick of some god’s finger. I think back to the start-camp pony who marooned himself up a hillock. This is steeper, the pony braver, the air far hotter, and the whole situation very much more serious since I am serious now, serious about winning, in all seriousness.

  A sight drops into my frantic thoughts: pink dot, moving on the slow course of a star. The red van is pursuing her. They’re on their way to urtuu 20 already.

  I was angsty that day, after the early-morning calm. If I’d spent the past days trying to get inside the tunnel of the race, on this day—the sixth—I seemed to have spouted out the other end. My sense of my surroundings weakened and I was barely present, even as the horse stared out from his nose muttering, There is no world but this. I wish I’d known some technique for staying there. Not “there” in a particular spot, but there in my body in those moments, the ones that kept leaping along. Moving and yet not.

  I was facing a pointlessness the race had, until then, mainly submerged. Things hurt—body, mind—and I wondered if it was simply life. I look back at this nineteen-year-old and think she is probably just plain sad, but the word is unknown.

  And the horse carried her, and the horse carried her. All day long, the horses carried her. As she rode down the drop, motoring for the next set of mini-cliffs below, she was trapped in a cycle of heavy thoughts, as incessant as the rocks setting slide after slide in motion below her. Could she joke with this black dog, tease it out of herself? She comes to a woeful conclusion: she can ride the horses, but she cannot ride her mind.

  I’m sure it makes things easier not having any human company. Rhythms move inside me to build me back up. Soon I’ll be cantering away from the mountainside with enough speed to quell the worst of my thoughts.

  The valley floor is soothing as a bath after a long day.

  We reach the station, where you can smell the nearby river. Baska’s interpreter walks up to me as I ride in. I’m told, in a tone of some authoritative pleasure, that Devan is an hour ahead and I must sit a fifty-six-minute penalty at the next urtuu because I apparently “rode until 8:58 p.m. last night.”

  I jump out of my ears. I only rode until 8:33 p.m. How can I prove the error when I was alone and spent the night with a family unconnected to the race?

  I file an impassioned complaint with Tsetsgee while Baska takes the heart rate. His head is slanted away from the race. He doesn’t seem to care. But then there’s that thing about people who flop their arms and appear not to care—sometimes they care more than anyone, care enough they don’t want anyone to know they care, because the caring might lose force if it reveals itself.

  I run to the ger, where strings of drying blocks of milk line the eaves—carefully cut shapes of yak’s milk, cow’s milk, mare’s milk, sheep’s milk. I tried one of these blocks yesterday; it was an effort to conceal my repulsion. Social disaster number 76.

  Without time for a meal, I stuff my pockets with boortsog, the morning and midday pastries deep-fried in mutton fat. They’re so hardy you could send them round the world in the post. I haven’t seen many vegetables lately. I treasured the streaks of carrot in the sushi yesterday afternoon.

  I ferry boortsogs down my throat as I pace over to the horse. Without Charles at the station, the race feels like a dull rush again. Part of me is disappointed by the way I move through the urtuu so automatically. I glimpse the river, where the grass is eaten down to velvet, and envisage a holiday on its bank. What am I doing? I begin to ask myself, seeing Baska eyeing me bound up to the saddle. I long for a time of no-asking.

  “Don’t think, feel,” says Aunt Lucinda to cross-country riders. She finds brain surgeons particularly difficult to teach because they so love to think everything through. “As soon as you think, you move too soon.”

  I choo choo the twentieth horse away from his home but he struggles so much I return him to the station, where everyone has shrunk back into their routines. They swivel heads and shoulders to receive me again. I thrust the tack onto another, younger pony, itching to get on, but this one is just as reluctant. He wiggles in an odd, untrained gait along a sorry highway of mud tracks while I chew on boortsog, taunted by the impending penalty. Our afternoon shadow bumps along beneath us. Somewhere a herd of wistful mares canters by, foals clinging to their sides, creatures little and wild. The reluctant pony neighs and veers towards their glimmering coats. We push on, into the void.

  XXXV

  It’s about quarter past three when the reluctant pony delivers me into urtuu twenty. Each of the last few stations has seemed full of bodies, but this one’s a party. I stare with astronaut eyes. Charles winds his way to the front of the crowd to greet me, and it’s in these seconds before we say anything that the magnetism of his static is most irresistible.

  “Headquarters,” he announces, “have got the penalty wrong. The satellite trackers can be inaccurate.”

  You don’t say, I think, sliding off. Instead of the original fifty-six-minute proposal, they make me sit a sixteen-minute penalty, convinced I rode until 8:38 p.m.

  The station, surrounded by worn-down earth, seems like it has been here for a while. The horse lines tip over the hillside into a steep brown bowl and the smell of wet dust is mystifying.

  A young girl, maybe nine years old, edges in to fill up my water bottle while Charles tells me Clare has hit the ground from a bucker. Apparently she’s now riding without her kit, clinging to third place with Kirsten after leaving Chloe behind to recover from her sickness.

  Neither Charles nor I knows at this point that Devan’s father has been tweeting to the Mongol Derby website, asking if I’ve sat my penalties and complimenting his daughter’s progress. Not that my father would have been doing differently, if he knew how to work Twitter.

  When the girl returns with my bottle full, she looks at me keenly, with a warm, precise smile. It’s enough to draw apart the curtains in my chest, and the moment fixes itself in my heart. Charles’s presence dilutes it, but this I do not mind.

  The next leg has been passing with all the monotony of a sea crossing when, an hour and a half in, the pony lies down beneath me in the manner of a devoted fireside rug. I find myself with both feet on the ground.

  What are you doing? I ask him. I have never known a horse to take a seat.

  Joining you, he replies.

  Charles wanted me to choose a spotty, dog-like creature for the leg instead of this horse, and I n
ow regret not listening to him. Amid the indecision, Charles had stopped to look at me without blinking, which caused my stomach to jump into my throat, where it has been perching all afternoon, lizard-like.

  It really hits me during this leg that love—some form of it—brings me alive and strings me along. Always has, always will—even and especially the unrequited and the unhappened love, the Case Pendings in the Department of Romance.

  From what I can tell—well, I’m only nineteen—love affairs in the England I grew up in aren’t obvious. People tend not to display the full extent of their feelings, letting love quietly hold them together behind the scenes, even in January, even in queues. The problem, if it is a problem at all, is that I rarely get to the affair. I just wait like a bird feeder. I haven’t really clocked my lack of boldness in love, let alone taken action to reverse it.

  The day lightens when I work out there can’t be more than 200 kilometers to the finish, which means I may finish the race tomorrow evening. Nearing urtuu 21, we reach a soum called Ulziit, which is ruled by offensive clouds. A chill enters me. The town is frontier-like. It summons a full stop out of the infinite steppe.

  We arrive at a torrential river on Ulziit’s far side. Her banks look overwhelmed. So many of the rivers I’ve passed are roaring—I think it must be the time of year. Summer has reached capacity.

  Rain starts pecking my cheeks—a series of micro-prods: go-go-go. At the river the horse enlarges his nostrils into black holes, snorting air at the torrent. He quicksteps back to assess, from which position he spends several minutes ignoring my urging hips and my heel pokes at his rib cage. He also ignores my comments about how the bridge will be a solid thing, separate from the water, very traversable.

  It just so happens that the good old fishcakes from ABC catch up with us now. The driver, a blond, beer-bellied white American, opens his door to tell me I should dismount and lead my horse. I wish I’d thought of this myself. The pony’s eyes drop to watch my feet walk on just ahead, suggesting to him the ground is safe. Come now, come now, it’s alright, I say, trying to turn myself into a site of conviction, a leader. Over we jitter, reaching a wall of cloud.

  I walk the last kilometer of the twenty-first leg on foot, feeling stacks of earth beneath me, studying the tendrils of land beyond the coming camp, readying myself to ride into night again—the pony at the end of my reins already dropping into the past. There’s still an hour and a half until cutoff. But when I reach Charles in the gray light of urtuu 21, he announces the race has been “held,” whatever that means—it isn’t a term they mentioned at the briefing or in the rule book.

  Charles’s nonchalant tone dismantles my momentum. He explains that Devan and I have ridden too fast for the vets and stewards to keep up. We need to wait until morning to continue. Devan will leave at 7 a.m. while I’ll wait until 8:25 to maintain the hour-and-twenty-five-minute gap between us. I have lost so much to her today. She is currently fast asleep, flopped over like a dead bird in the corner of a ger, breathing dreams of victory.

  I remember hearing a rider declare, during a meal of bright-pink-pasted sandwiches at start camp, that this was “base camp,” as though we were about to ascend Everest. Winning the race was “the equivalent of climbing Everest without an oxygen tank,” added another. No one really believed them, but I like thinking of two people hanging from a mountain cliff. They can’t afford to quarrel, even if they hate each other.

  Ahimsa, a concept Gandhi emphasized, involves concentrating on not hating your enemy. I can’t say ahimsa is on my mind this evening, with the finish line so close (maybe I’m too juvenile to indulge in ethical practice). But later I will question whether my obsession with Devan qualifies as a skewed kind of love. Albertus Magnus of the 1200s, a German Catholic friar and bishop who was later made a saint, saw great power in the intensity of any emotion. “A certain power to alter things indwells in the human soul, . . . particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love or hate or the like. . . . Everyone can influence everything magically if he falls into great excess.”

  I feel there’s no chance of my winning from this far behind. Might it be time to skip my way out of here? With only four stations to go until the end, I feel freedom approaching—oh, the very idea—a mass of fatigue falls out of my body. I spot the lake and want a naked swim through its water. Off I go, bounding down the herby, stony ground in a towel, merry me merry me merry me. I do not feel the pain in my bare feet. Mongolia is one of the highest countries in the world, with an average elevation of around 1,500 meters, and I can’t actually breathe that well when I run. This might be why I’ve sometimes had the sense that I’m on the moon out here.

  Charles has seen me disappear and reported to headquarters that I’ve gone for a dip. “It is a bit cold for a swim,” he tells them. I grind to a halt at a muddy marsh ruled by flies, where I commence the swim in the spirit in which I set out, and emerge dirtier. Miserable lake. Fishless.

  Up at the cars below camp, I find Charles, Richard, and a few others talking. I’m too far away to interrupt and too sheepish to go nearer, but Charles screams as I pass.

  “Watch out!”

  A sinister giant lizard—was it a chameleon, I later wonder?—is poised beneath me. About to strike. I whinny in terror, leaping away into Richard’s camera, my towel almost falling. Quickly I replace my panic with intense interest—I’ve been wanting to meet more steppe wildlife. We stand in a circle around the stunned beast. Charles crouches to examine it. Maybe an upbringing in South Africa has left him expert on such creatures.

  “Highly poisonous,” he says. “I’ll catch it.”

  If there’s one way to prove your worth, it is to launch yourself onto a poisonous lizard five hours from the nearest hospital. I clench my jaw as Charles lunges with a towel and lands on it. He stands up clutching the toweled creature against his chest. It may now bite him.

  Someone bursts into laughter. It is fake, fake they say, tipping the lizard out of the towel. It’s made of plastic. This has to be one of the larger letdowns of my life so far. On par with the evening I thought I was eating hawk, when really I had misheard the word “pork.”

  ABC Alex follows me back to my bed. He wants to video me unpacking. I have to ask myself what he’s really after, since such a clip can hardly make compelling television. I’ve been monosyllabic with him all day.

  His crew car was nigh on stapled to my back for that last leg on the reluctant pony, and nothing would shake it off. Each time I’d said “Ho” to walk, they drove up to our side and drained all our peace. Alex’s window would glide down, revealing his white T-shirt, his black combed hair, and his inappropriate smile.

  “We’re on Team Lara!” he shouted during one of these episodes. I suppose he wanted to flatter me into a few more comments for his documentary. Already he had drawn out thoughts I’d prefer to have left unformulated.

  “Devan’s boring. It’s more entertaining following you,” he shouted.

  I found it difficult to imagine how Devan—my engine, my fuel—could be classified as “boring.” If it had been a dinner party I’d have thought, Oh, ah, must remain polite to this man. But it wasn’t a dinner party, and I didn’t reply.

  Now that I’m off the horse, I politely display my bungee ropes, my sun creams, and my bag full of six types of no-longer-identifiable pills, from which I am now taking regular doses.

  Jeeps and camper vans are drawing in, positioning themselves for tomorrow. With any luck it will be my final day, though there are racers farther back who will ride another three days before nearing the finish. As crew members gather, my ecstasy grows, and I revel in the use of toilet paper once more. No one takes any notice as I dip in and out of the party, bluebottle thing. I have the soothing feeling that although they’re ignoring me, they’re present at this camp because of me (and Devan), positioned to launch into a full day of monitoring me (and Devan).

  At the edge of camp I hurdle Richard’s one-man tent a few times, not once cleanly. Br
other Arthur has a better technique, and always beats me at such feats. There was a joke before I left home about how I’m always second to him. I think of this now and it feels very sore, with only a slither of funny.

  In the end I don’t eat dinner. I’ve no appetite; in fact, I feel sick as I stagger into the darkened ger for bed. I bump the metal bed legs. Ouch, pulsing shins. I only notice illness has taken me when I fail to contemplate Devan as I lie down. She’s just a couple of meters away but long since departed for the realm of sleep. I’m not surprised I’m ill, since so many other riders have been unwell. I presume I’m suffering the same sickness.

  I lie down and think about whether I’ll be too ill to ride tomorrow. I know we all spend periods of our lives unwell in some way, but I think my body decides the timing—I believe in illness, I believe in accident, though I can’t decide in what way. Is it time to give up? I could sleep for forty-eight hours and still ride through the finish in good time. Somehow fourteenth position sounds attractively inconsequential.

  By midnight, the party outside seems to have devolved into a few slow conversations. I really need to throw up. Two members of the race staff are kissing on the far floor of the ger as vomit enters my mouth. I haul off the creaky bed, noisier than an old trampoline, and land on the person beneath me. Tsetsgee? She squirms in her spongy sleep and resumes unconsciousness. Swallowing my sick I dash outside, where night has gulped up the day. I collapse behind the ger. Headlamps swivel in my direction.

  “Oi, Charles, who’s squatting over there?”

  There is muffled laughter.

  I circle the camp in search of barrels of water, nearly splatting onto Richard’s one-man tent in the process. Undetectable window panes must be a nightmare for flies.