As I angle round a chalky track atop my horselegs, a creature sticks its neck out from a cave. It’s ABC Alex. He grins beneath the recorder.
I do not protest his filming. “Only because it’s beautiful here,” I say.
Later, riders will see wild camels grazing on the other side of the basin. Perhaps they’re here as I pass too. The distances escape me as I descend, seesawing along inside my head, thinking—not for the first time—of how many kilometers we might be behind Devan.
Near the final urtuu of the race, the dun pony breathes harder. He’s going to keep me waiting at the station. Walking beside him with my hand on his neck, I see his eyes drip and feel bad for his wooden legs. We wind sloppily through the shade of dry trees. The grasslands are gone. The dry land mutters in pain beneath our hooves.
Can we be infinitely patient? Can we be infinitely free?
The station’s white blobs rise into sight, sheltered by a link in the mountains. When I scan the land, I see a shape glide away beneath stone ridges and disappear round the corner. It is she, driving her way from the last station to the finish line aboard four dutiful legs. From this far away I could almost pick her up with a pair of tongs. How have I not fallen farther behind her on my slow pony? Was her previous horse just as slow?
A further few minutes of walking and I sign in at the final station—four gers parked below a craggy mountain cup. The sun is still high, though it’s after 4 p.m. People seem hot and bothered, perhaps bored of waiting out the day. Where’s Charles? How flimsy of me to wonder.
There is no English-speaking vet at the station, only Richard. He confirms Devan was the shape I saw leaving this station five minutes ago. He says she had a quick leg before but was made to wait here for thirty minutes while her pony’s heart rate dropped. I don’t understand why she’s pushing her horses to the extent that she has to wait for them to recover.
In Haiti, Rome, and West Africa, among other places, it was once thought that you could ask your demon to spoil your enemy’s luck. I wasn’t thinking of that when I told ABC that I hoped Devan would fall down a marmot hole—likely I am the only one who has fallen down a marmot hole—but things seem to be happening. Objects contracting and expanding. Someone speaking from within the air. This future is not what it used to be. After six days of riding, Devan Horn is only minutes ahead. I’m wildly surprised.
In the Ulaanbaatar control room, organizers debate the Devan–Lara rivalry.
“In my sage-dom,” writes Katy on Twitter from Ulaanbaatar, “the only thing I can think of that would cause a change in the rule book is if they get into a brawl on the finish line and one of them knocks out a) Maggie, race steward, b) my boss, race founder, or c) each other.”
I don’t think Devan and I in a fight would work. I’m not good at expressing anger. Can’t confront others or even gather myself in the name of it. A bit like plankton.
The dun horse’s heart rate is level at the first check. I move fast, barely tuning in to the atmosphere at the station. Race rules will give ponies’ heart rates sixty minutes, rather than the usual 45, to level at the finish line. This rule was invented in case of a race to the line where riders cannot walk the ponies the last stretch to let them cool. Will I race Devan to the line? I fear she’s just out of reach, but that can’t stop me trying.
Richard is quiet now. They’re all quiet. On the dirt, three boys discuss my final horse without making noise. Their caps poke at the sky. I notice the animal they throw my saddle over has legs like tree trunks, but preferring fate at this late stage, I offer no opinion. I’m at his shoulder as soon as they have tightened his girth. I lift my left foot into the stirrup and mount. I try to thread together a smile for anyone glancing at my departing face, but I have a cut on my lip and it hurts.
The final leg will take us to a place close to the site of start camp. We have traversed a wiggly loop and return now to the point of source.
XXXVIII
Squeeze calves, lift body. My last horse of the race, a dark chestnut, bucks in the canter. Devan is too close for me to go back and change horses. I tense my body against him.
For the first ten minutes Richard follows us. His head and camera sprout from the sunroof of his car. All day I’ve felt his photography dissolving me. I don’t like performing for a future moment, not when the race is about to end.
Straight-faced, plain-toned, I shout through our wind. “Did you see him bucking? Is Devan’s horse faster?”
Richard lowers his camera and squints his eyes. “’Bout the same, I should think.”
At 32 kilometers, the last leg is shorter than most.
“Do you think I can canter this one all the way to the finish?” I yell.
“No, wouldn’t have thought so.”
He mows on ahead, sewing the plains together with his path. Mountains line our side, from where the land runs out on an incline. The shades of hazy orange in the plain suggest, to me, a national bog park, so we stick to the tracks. The pony zigzags and throws his eyes backwards like fishing rods. As with any horse, he can see around to his tail but not directly ahead. The route to the finish is a simple straight line. He wants to go home and isn’t lost enough to forget it.
By the fifth kilometer, sweat saturates his red-brown fur. On judgment day I will see Richard’s photo, where my arm is raised with the goatskin whip, demanding him to keep his canter. I will question who the problem here is. Aunt Lucinda says what takes the horse forward is not speed, but desire. This boy has neither. I wriggle and rampage and gesture Onwards! His reply is a deep indifference.
Riding horses is only ever different each time. “That’s why we continue all these years—addicted to the surprise,” says Aunt Lucinda. My surprise is I am flying a plod to the finish. In the photo he looks like liquid movement. But if you look closer, you’ll notice his ears tensed back. Horses talk with their ears, and the angle is a grumpy one. No lens can see the bitterness between us.
We trudge on through the cosmic yellow plain.
suchspace
Two hours in, we’ve only made 25 kilometers. We walk through a dip in the plain where the friendly grasses blow slowly. There is no sign of Devan ahead. With 7 kilometers to go, the race seems lost again yet it’s somehow still living. I sit back and sink in to let the chestnut breathe on the lengthened rein. When I ask for canter again, he refuses. Don’t look at me askance like that, my friend. Do we not have an understanding?
Choo! He bucks.
I kick, he bucks.
I stand in the stirrups and flick the rein over his neck.
He bucks with his ears pinned back.
A gang of my past selves surrounds me. In all the years of my father proclaiming advice at breakfast and the teachers issuing me with detentions, I cherished the idea that if I ever did that treacherous thing and became An Adult, I would at least know how to treat someone like myself. No force, nor any of those stupid stern teacher looks that made Mum laugh when I relayed them to her in the car. Just some understanding and togetherness.
How perfectly I forget. The harder I push, the sourer the chestnut becomes. He holds his hooves to the ground, where the grasses twitch their muscles. I get off his back and inspect him from the side. Steam is exiting his body. Too much canter? Perhaps in company he’d be going better? He might run if I lead him. I drag the reins from his mouth and sprint on the spot like a cartoon character. He moves no faster than a start-stop walk. I rest panting. Two puffy clouds reel above us, unsure which way to drift.
It seems the chestnut thinks I want the race to last forever. I lift my helmet off in abdication, ruffling my hair in relief. Have I escaped the race? A new kind of freedom visits me as the pony half closes his eyes by my dead thigh. Yet I still feel tormented. I pull my phone out from a vest pocket. I haven’t turned it on since Ulaanbaatar. The welcome message is startling: Choo choo! Train coming!—I set it up on my flight from Beijing, before I knew “choo” meant “giddyup.” I scroll down all five of my foreign contacts. Each beep
sounds like a dead-end. I think I haven’t thought of home, but of course it comes rushing back in the desperation. Family, so much family, an avalanche of family.
It never seems quite right to call my mother because I cannot tell what she will have in her hands, or where her other ear will be floating. But I do. I ring Appleshaw, where the ladybirds crawl and the plums have surely begun to fall, life dropping to earth in fervent portions. Mum might be gathering apples in the garden, from where she can hear the chickens waffling through morning or midday cluck, and where, too, she can spot the men of the family hovering in the windows, one shaving, one panicking at nothing, one loving his dog.
On the sixth beep, it’s her. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Lara. I don’t know what to do. My horse won’t move.”
Silence. The chestnut dozes at my side, his nostrils looking down to earth.
“Lara? Wait. What? Lara my daughter? How are you calling me from Mongolia?”
“I don’t know.”
“Arthur! George! Simon! Come here! Lara’s on the telephone.”
Her tone is manic. It sounds like Harold isn’t at home but the other two brothers are. They’re far enough away to remind me this is absurd.
“Well why won’t it move? Speak to Arthur.”
“Kick it! Whip it!”
George shouts in the background. “Tell her to run with it!”
They are dogs jumping up. They are scarves slinging in the wind.
“He really won’t move. I don’t care anymore.”
“No! You’ve got to win! She’s giving up—she’s giving up.”
Their morning sky is rising.
“Beat this Texan bitch!”
I say goodbye and hang up without pause.
Some lines come to mind—
Didn’t they ring you? Did no one call?
To remind us it’s a dream, wide and tall; to
remind us it’s a dream,
and we will fall.
I head down the slope towards two gers, a pony stuffed with excuses trailing the reins, moving no faster than his start-stop walk. He’s a reminder of what it is to coast at the sidelines. Of how nice it is to release myself. Of how very much in this race I have become. How has it all come to matter so much?
Ahead is the first encampment I’ve seen since the last station. I hope someone here knows what my pony is cross about. A short, blue-cloaked man sees our approach and ties his horse to the line. I bound over.
“Sain baina uu!”
He’s silent. I begin my performance regardless, offering snorts and squeals to give him a sense of the pony’s behavior. I also act out the bucks and do some pinned-back ears.
His reply is a smirk and a series of whispers. Maybe he has lost his voice. I listen to his words as though I’m about to divinely acquire the ability to understand Mongolian, but nothing he whispers suggests this is imminent. I’ll never be convinced I’ve been here, in Mongolia, if I can’t sit comfortably in a single phrase of the language.
A scar extending from the man’s nose to his ear crinkles as he speaks. From the shapes of his eyes, I think he is drunk or high. Charles told us not to go northwest the other day because of a rowdy village en route—the antics of drunken men are chronicled by riders every year.
A mustache and a long nose make this man’s face. He mimes out smoking in his tent, asking if I’d like to join. I refuse in English.
“No! I am not coming inside. There is a problem with the horse.” I point back to a creature withdrawn into dreams.
I leave my helmet at his shoes and mount to display the problem. Seeing the pony buck me out of the saddle, he smiles—broken-toothed and, in places, completely toothless.
I dismount and open my arms to gesture. Would you like to get on and feel for yourself? He throws a hand onto my left breast and squeezes hard. As you would a lemon. When I thrust his hand away, his grin grows and he grabs my bum instead, rubbing and pinching it. I swerve out of his grasp and throw my hand through his cheek. Slap. It feels fantastic. I’m not sure I’ve ever slapped before.
He is staring me down with his head on an incline. His eyes are trying to focus. I feel I can outrun him in his drunken state, though it has crossed my mind that he might have a knife or some other weapon. He turns away and heads for the ger.
Maybe he’s going to get help? Another possibility is him rallying support to lure me into the ger. He reappears with his wife and daughter in tow. They wear matching purple shirts. They’ll help—yes, I’m sure they will. I remount and display the pony’s antics, but they laugh when he hurls me up his neck. Help? I am merely the act of the day. I get off and walk the slumbering chestnut away.
It will take two hours to walk the last 7 kilometers. I turn back to the man shamelessly and point at the horse on his line. With striving eyebrows I ask him if I can ride it. It will cost me $20, he says, performing his fingers. An alarm sounds inside me. I cannot pay for a pony to taxi me to the finish.
Again the chestnut and I plod away up the hill together. I tickle his withers as I gaze into the air. Devan will be crossing the finish line. She is almighty. She is surely the winner. Has the Derby ever seen so fierce a competitor? I must remember to send her a card.
I am slightly embarrassed by the prospect of finishing second. Yet seven days ago I could barely imagine finishing.
With the competition lifted, I can feel the land more than ever. I notice the involuntary drone of all the small forms around me. Maybe things and people don’t need to be convincing, they just need to exist. I find it hard to imagine what we’ve been doing riding from station to station all this time. In moments like this, I catch glimpses of myself uncertain, as though the only truth I can rely upon is human extinction.
I strangely missed myself, who I imagine
To be a living being either of ancient times or the future
Ayurzana Gun-Aajav taps into my confusions about where I might even be, at any one time.
We’ve been walking side by side for about ten minutes when the noise of a motorbike engine expands from the land. I look up to see a machine blazing along the edge of the plain. It turns towards me. A man. Not another.
The figure draws in and gets off his motorbike. His arms hang gently from his shoulders. I recognize him as the gangly teenager from the last station who helped choose this horse. There’s a quiet tension between us until he climbs onto the chestnut and kicks and whips with more might than I ever dared use. I see the horse walk forward, drudging out of his grump. The boy whips on and the chestnut trots a little. A miracle of force? A forced miracle?
I haven’t a moment to question. We swap places. I kick, shout, and imagine action. The boy revs his motorbike up the pony’s bottom to scare him onwards and we find the trot again. For half a kilometer, the boy revs, adding hoots for good measure. We trail over the steppe noisily. By the time he hands me back my helmet we are trotting well, but when he takes his motorbike away the pony stops again. He returns to push us onwards once more. Then he recedes into the emptiness, waving once.
Agreeably, truthfully, we antler our way towards the end. I ride with a free head, carrying my helmet in one hand and the pony’s reins in the other. The strong line of mountains above us unpacks into bouldered outcrops. It’s as though a giant has been playing Lego. One of these forms is the wishing rock, which the map book tells us to make a wish at. Passersby have paid their respects with blue scarves and empty bottles of Chinggis Khan vodka, but I have nothing left to wish for. Does it matter—will it ever—that I have faded, like the weather? That I will be second again?
“Wish” is a word from the magical world—originally the wishing rod, or magic wand. To wish is not just to desire; it is a form of action.
I’d like to end here, in this eventful final leg—the refusing horse, the groping man, the apparitional boy. I belong in this chain of hiccups. I don’t want to add any more—no words, no strides. But the finish is cantering towards me: I can see it now on the distant slope
. I keep glancing away in the hope it will slide off the curve of the earth. I dread docking back into the human web.
Shall we press our paws on land? Do we dare?
The anthill grows into an array of vehicles and humans clustered around a flimsy flag. Closer, we reach Richard, who seems naked without his jeep. I’m ashamed to say I’m ashamed to look at him. He’s on a different tack, snapping us from every angle, scuttling as though the ground is an electric current he can’t touch for long. This is the most animated I’ve seen him all week.
“Put your helmet on,” he says through a clenched jaw as we pass.
What’s he on about?
“No, I can’t be bothered.”
“Devan’s about to get a penalty. Put your bloomin’ helmet on or you’ll be disqualified.”
The surprise stuns the land. I see it curling inwards.
I mean, in theory I can believe Devan has a heart rate penalty. She’s been so close to incurring one all day. But not at this point, not with this significance—the possibility of losing her victory. It will relegate her two hours and I will eat balloons.
The chestnut shuffles the meter onwards. Richard sprints after us. Photo. Click. Further photos. Clickalicklick. My ears feel like two jokes protruding from my head. I don’t like the urgency of his command but I throw myself over this obstacle and lay the helmet on my head with the floppiest of wrists. As the sweated nylon merges with my wet forehead, Richard dashes in front of us for the final seconds.
XXXIX
In my recurring Mongol Derby dreams, I never win. Often the race doesn’t get to the end of itself at all. It’s as though the finish isn’t the point, nor even the direction in which the energy has been thrusting. There’s rarely a sequence of one-after-another; time and space flex and vanish. Sometimes Devan is on fighting form, way ahead of the pack. Often Devan isn’t there at all.
Rough Magic Page 20