When the barrels emerge from the murk, I prepare to wait half an hour for the distillation tablets to fight the Battle of the Bacteria. But I’m too thirsty. Five minutes in, water is pouring down my throat like a herd of heroic stallions, freeing the parched plains of my body. The vets are snoring now, and I am the lonely daughter of an evening gone cold.
This brother of mine Arthur, he’s got a wispy fringe, backward-leaning posture, short trousers, and well-placed moles. Somewhere around the age of ten, he forgot how to smile for photographs—I think because he was embarrassed by his teeth.
“I’m not sure she really understands about life yet,” he once said of me. Our relations are cordial, if slightly cold—certainly never affectionate. I did once accidentally cut off three of his fingers. He fell over just in front of me and the side of my ski went through his hand. The SOS team took him away and I was left looking back up at a trail of blood on the white mountainside.
In a week’s time I will read a message from him, sent through tonight. “The whole world is watching (I am not joking)—everybody following your every move. I LOVE YOU.”
XXXVI
Seven is my lucky number. It’s Aunt Lucinda’s lucky number too. I’m sure I didn’t copy her—lots of people like seven. It crouches between rounded, even numbers with all the energy of an odd underdog.
Horses make me superstitious. In eventing, riders are identified with two- or three-digit numbers when they ride cross-country. If my competition number doesn’t add up to seven, I am worried for the day. It’s not as literal as “Seven will protect me from rotational falls,” it’s more the sense that it will regulate and enforce the future through a chaotic code I can’t quite see.
As the night passes I find myself thinking of seven. Tomorrow will be the seventh day of riding. Something might happen. This thought glances through my mind and returns to pass more slowly. Then I think of the obvious numbers: the urtuus. Four legs remain, meaning three urtuus beyond this one—22, 23, 24. No sevens there. If the finish line were an urtuu, it would be the 25th, and the digits 2 and 5 do make 7. But it’s not an urtuu; it’s the finish line. Nothing can happen after the finish, so I flick to a conclusion: I won’t be overtaking Devan tomorrow. I do not know this completely, but I suspect knowingly, feel I understand the outcome deeply.
Beyond my number jumbling, I have one solemn thought: If Devan triumphs, the world will have gone ever so slightly wrong.
I agree it’s a little too much, but it is a thought that flits by.
The seventh day begins in the sog of an unwell sleep. I swim up to the surface, luring my dreams out the back of my brain. All night long they teased me, tickling my predicaments to life. Horses careen down the back drive in one dream (escape! escape!), and somewhere there was a vision of my father hot and my mother cold, both howling preverbally, no alphabet in their brains, just one large moon of pain. It’s too soon to dissect that one. There were also goats flying all night, nearly dying, and tongues turning corners. Fish singing riptide hymns, while heavens opened and resealed for quieter times—plain bodies and the hairs upon them, nothing more.
Nothing more. The light extinguishes dreams. A rat gallops across the floor and I’m vertical, stroking my tiny tummy with the satisfaction of an evil marmot. I’ve been up all night waiting to vomit. I have not eaten and I cannot eat. There is nothing left of me but me. I’ll have to draw energy from my head and the horses. Take the tiredest of dogs for a run, and watch her give every muscle she never knew she owned to the sprint.
My old friend Miranda, who has immense social stamina but doesn’t care about sport, flings messages into my unmanned inbox. “This is the most exciting sport I’ve ever watched,” and hours later, “I can’t go to sleep I keep refreshing the map qnwojdljakakfhdakdans.” They have all resorted to the dramatic. Me? I’m almost too sick to care.
What early rising train is this?
To where does it intend to escape from this sleepy life?
These lines by Ayurzana Gun-Aajav, a contemporary Mongolian poet, make me question my urge to escape. I push into morning, resisting my desire to ride out through the back door of the race, on a journey away, perhaps towards home—which is where? We never quite decide, so heading home, we go nowhere. Maybe home is just all that we leave behind.
For the first time in the race it seems I’ve slept through my alarm. I must be truly ill. Devan has left. There aren’t many minutes before my 8:25 departure time. I fling bits of equipment out of the ger, where they sit, petrified. On this day, I will do things without love. The thick air drenches me. My body sweats a strange sweat. A line of ants starts crawling up my calf, as if to fetch me for a party below. Take me, gently, lower my body down.
Richard hovers nearby, tracking my packing with his camera. “I’m going to collapse,” I tell him. The stomach bug has me. His mouth moves below the camera, saying something about the other competitors who had food poisoning.
“It only tends to last fifteen hours or so,” he says, his feather-light Irish accent caressing me. “You should be better by midday.”
He’s speaking so softly I’m surprised I can hear.
In the corner of my eye Charles drives out of camp, heading west for the riders behind us. The window pane between us lets me look him in the eye. Do I dare venture further than these looks? I turn my core to face his car as it passes the last ger, and he waves. There’s no knowing when I might see him again. His engine sound dies into an elsewhere.
I lumber down to the horse line like a giraffe on the moon, but find myself in need of the toilet again when I get there.
Maggie laughs. “How are you going to stay on a horse for four hours?”
I don’t know. Don’t get ahead of the movement. We must be stronger than we imagine, must somewhere be carrying a force, stuffed into our chests, probably blackberry-shaped.
Up at the toilet, I squat and feel my headache prick. I look out at the morning earth, still spread with dew, anad the low-leaning sky. There are 160 kilometers between here and the finish. Four legs—twelve hours. Every morning I’ve studied the map book and ensured my route. Today no no, too ill, too turtlish. Tucked inside my wrinkles. I’m an ancient in the race’s lifespan.
An hour and twenty minutes ago, Devan rode out on the fastest pony at the station. I’m lifting my foot to the stirrup of a lifeless gray when the ABC crew pincers me.
“Any last wishes, Lara?”
“For Devan to fall down a marmot hole.”
Oh dear. Sickness has made me transparent. Time to rattle my way out of here. I heave up onto the gray.
He makes no movement. How can he be the second-fastest horse at the—
He snaps my question in half. Brings his hooves alive. I hear the sound of our sound catching up with us. We are ripping through the plain, his ears flat back like a hare’s. Cloud surrounds and makes the world feel small. Richard takes a photo of my eyes falling out of my head—exhaustion, delight, I look like a hooligan. He gives this shot to the BBC.
All leg, I barely move my body. It seems you can guide a horse by thought alone, thisaway, thataway, bending through the scrubland.
Alex’s red van hangs about, but I’m mute. No more blossoming laughter. He’s left with the streak of ice at my center.
When we come to a road crossing that the map book describes as “quite busy,” part of me feels let down by the fact there isn’t a vehicle in sight. Today I wanted car eyes glancing into me, pictured them questioning their direction as I rode horizontally across them. People from home with blurred faces.
I don’t think the Prior-Palmer family, if they are watching, will realize I am ill and cannot win. It is late evening for them, and I am just a dot on their map, smaller than a star in the faint English sky. I hear a sibling-like subconscious musing—what is this bolt, wherefrom this blue? Girl looks to be functioning. Out there, on the steppe. History acting upon her.
Am I illuminated by the distance?
Urtuu 22 sits behind a
square-topped mountain that might turn into a castle later in geological time. I cleave to its side until the urtuu comes into view. I love the first sighting of my temporary home. The pony canters me all the way in, spooling out over the flatlands, pinned to a nine-mile moon. I must have underridden him.
Can I convey the warmth I feel, sealed and barely mentionable, as his hooves pull up to pause his charge? I step off onto soft summer mud where the boots have been pacing. His heart rate is immediately low.
“How long ago did Devan ride through?” I ask.
“About fifty minutes before you,” says Erdenmunkh, through his interpreter.
On a pony the herder said would be slower than Devan’s, we have somehow made up thirty-five minutes in one leg.
ABC Alex is at the station, poking his camera around, nosier than hamsters. I walk away from him, saying with newfound animal defiance, “Don’t you dare follow me again.” It feels wrong that he can tape me into infinity when I’m at my most finite.
For the third-last leg of the race, I was paired with a black horse who pinged me off before I took root on his back. Erdenmunkh held him while I wiped the dust from my knees and prepared to mount again. It was a buck serious enough that, when he tried to do it a second time, I had to let the reins go to divert him into a bolt. He dived out of the station and we catapulted across the plain, his legs plummeting and lifting off, blather, gallop, we went in one blink. I held myself tight and thrust my heels down in an attempt to stay with him.
A kilometer or so out of the station, his foreleg dropped into a hidden marmot hole. We spun through the air like crumpets journeying out of a toaster. I felt myself flying down to earth, where dirt and stones scraped my face and a weight rolled over me. Then my arm hauled upwards. The pony was standing, wanting to run, but my grip had caught him—somehow, through the fall, his reins had stayed looped over my fingers.
I scrambled to a crouching position while he leaned away from me with a tilted head and rolled-back eyes. Woah, friend, woah. Anything broken? I held still. Told myself to calm. Breathe. Daft to want to beat Devan, anyway. Daft to push so hard.
Stalemate. Marmots got on with their day below ground, stroking their tummies, hugging each other with glee.
Whenever I fall I’m forced to realize that my actions are shaped by whatever I think of as dignity, whether I like to display this intention or not. That dignity disappears in falling. I have no control. Maybe, if there is some bodily code, my truth comes out in this vortex moment of vulnerability.
In the aftermath of the fall, I start to question space. Why did space do that. Is space cross with me? I am cross with space. It has flipped me over and contorted me so. It had been giving me so much ordinary motion that I’d numbed myself to the possibility that anything out of the ordinary could happen. Now, splatted, I remove all expectation.
I am peeved, meanwhile, that I told ABC Alex to pop off because it means he hasn’t filmed the fall. Though falls happen too quickly for me to grasp the idea that my life is in danger, they look sensationally dangerous to spectators. Alex has actually spied the accident through his binoculars and told the vet, who is reporting back to headquarters in Ulaanbaatar, who in turn will send a paramedic in my direction. They announced as much on Twitter.
After a slow self-X-ray I sense I’m not hurt, but it takes multiple attempts to get back on the panicked pony. My leg isn’t rotated over him when, on the sixth attempt, he torpedoes forth as though the horizon is leaving without him, galloping over the holes with just the same blindness he offered before our fall. It seems our burial has been a mere boost for the morning.
As the hours pile higher, I begin to feel less ill. The black horse settles into our little life together, his muscles contracting back and forth in a strong trot, the beat of his feet an equine metronome. As I rise and fall, I hear the regular sounds of things out of place—saddle flaps, keyring chain—and feel the hairs at the sides of my face, enjoying our path. I tell myself about the rain I love—the drops that land on my back like the pats of a benevolent grandparent—the rain that comes to massage the air and give the land a bath, lathering it in water sweet and replete.
There’s no rain today. The rainmaking magic’s away. Bare blue sky holds the stage. This is a land far away from the sea; clouds sometimes struggle to make it so far. The simple sun doesn’t create the right mood for the drama, though the shah of Khwarezm, Chinggis Khan’s enemy, was very moved by it. He thought the sun’s singularity was a sign there should only be one ruler on earth.
On we hurry under the delicate blue sky into a dry river basin. We roll down bone-land. The soil seems to have risen up and subsumed whatever wanted to grow. Steamrolling around a corner, I feel my pocket lose weight. I look round to our trail and see the water bottle falling forever backwards. It has escaped from my denim vest. Likely via the same route as the map book. There must be hole construction going on somewhere but I don’t want to explore. The vest only has to last a bit longer. Safe to say it has not been worth its denim aesthetic.
From the loose rocky face ahead of urtuu 23—the second-last of the race—I see the delicate shape of a horse and its rider sashaying away over the eastern hill. It is one o’clock. I swing out of saddle suspension and land at the station, which spins like a planet.
“Was that Devan who just left?” I ask Pete the vet.
He stands with his hands on his hips, sunburnt now. “Yes. She very nearly got a penalty. Her pony’s heart rate took forty minutes to come down. Five minutes from a two-hour penalty, ay.”
I like the way he cares about the race so earnestly.
“Devan waited twenty minutes for the heart rate to go down at the last station, too,” he adds, while taking my horse’s rate, which is level after six minutes.
Prophets like Dashtseren are never expected to predict accurately. Their art lies in making a sketch of a coming possibility. Dare I risk even a sketch? I am coming to have an idea of the meant, as in the meant-to-be, as in the thing my mother says when birthday cakes are burnt or rain cancels the village fete. “It was meant to be.”
I do not step into the ger. The race holds me taut. The tiniest person present takes my attention—a girl with pigtailed hair who clings to her mother’s hip. I lack the appetite to say yes when her timid elder sister steps forward to offer me a meal, but these quiet moments in their company nudge some brightness into me.
Pete reappears, chattering on. “I asked the family where their best horse was but the one they pointed out to me has disappeared. Come, come, let’s ask again.” He shuffles off as though wearing slippers. I haven’t a clue that, at 48 kilometers, the next leg—the second-to-last—will be the longest of the race.
After I leave the urtuu, Pete finds out that Mr. Bayarsaikhan, who was wearing a white beret, took his best horse off the line because he thought Devan shouldn’t have been made to wait for her pony’s heart to go down. During Naadam—an annual Mongolian festival involving wrestling, archery, and horse racing—the fastest horse over 15 to 30 kilometers wins and heart rate plays no role. Theoretically, the horse can drop dead two strides after the finish line and still be champion. Mr. Bayarsaikhan thinks the Derby welfare precautions are unfair to the riders.
XXXVII
Maybe long-term me just likes to be alone. I am on the second-to-last leg of the race. I am on the second-to-last leg of the race. I am on the second-to-last leg of the race and I can’t smile for Richard’s photographs because the pressure and the ache are now too great. I’d quite like to cry.
When the dun pony and I set off, we were seventeen minutes behind Devan. But the animal beneath me canters like a camel—which is to say, he cannot canter at all. I have a share in his body for the coming hours. His bones are my bones. I leave him to his own devices and let the land around us slow down. With this, the campaign to overtake Devan ends. She stretches farther into the lead; I see this in my mind. My thought runs on as we graft up the side of a marshland river. I pray for release from the rac
e. Voices speak to me in my head. Charles, and Richard, and home.
The ground is fertile, the grass is long, a Garden of Eden too good to ignore. Trotting through reed and bush, I forget about navigation. The GPS seems amused when I remember. We’ve missed the river crossing by 2 kilometers. The water’s strong and I think of turning back, but there is no time (that dog that runs away, hand in hand with thought), so I let the dun’s legs drop in and swim. He may not know the canter but he’s fluent in doggy paddle. His head rises above the water and brings me to the other side.
We move wet thereafter, entranced by the flies hopping in the grass. We are all going somewhere. I believed the water when she said this. We are pulled to our ends. When we reach a barricade of mountains, I look around and let the land strike me. I don’t know how mountains make their livings, nor do I understand the wider earth, but it does seem to have gotten here first. And when we’re gone, this is what will be. Living in desertion, the land knows what I don’t: no one can etch a story into earth or sky. The wind sprints the clouds away, the stage clears for another day.
Ayurzana Gun-Aajav writes:
Today is, perhaps, my final day,
The day to summarize for the last time
All the things I’ve been thinking of for the past several years.
Maybe we only ever have one day.
The leg grows long, the leg grows longer. Our route is mapped out on the GPS for this leg, but I find the trail deceiving. Ghosts of tracks peter out at every turn, confusing my instincts. We are clammy by the time the dun pony climbs the pass, where I smell slow-cooking herbs in the grass.
At the ridge we ride goodbye to the greens and peer into another vault in the earth’s consciousness—rainless soil and Martian rock turrets. There’s a graveyard of olive trees in the bowl. They draw up from the earth’s core like detached ancestors, chuckling at the race from centuries away.
Rough Magic Page 19