Rough Magic Read online

  By the time Maggie and Katy, the organizer who discounted my entry fee, leaned back in their armchairs and opened the floor for questions, I had grown comfortable enough in my seat to share some qualms. I raised an arm and waited.

  “Will anyone be waking us up in the mornings?”

  My voice was meek, as if I’d emerged from a breathless swim in a chlorine pool. These voices—the chlorine edition is just one—bring themselves up from my internal cellar and pour forth, unfiltered.

  The room cackled more with amazement than amusement. They didn’t know my alarm clock was an untrustable brand of wristwatch from a French supermarket. The panel, including Maggie, barely answered. “One fool can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer”—so says a Mongolian proverb.

  My tongue asked the next question without me. “If you’re with a partner and one of you falls, can you both ride one horse?”

  Heads swung around. I vacated my face as though my words weren’t intentional. I wanted to feel out the limits of this strange race. The panel admitted to having no rule against my proposition. As usual, I could sense everyone else in the room but had no grasp of myself—not of how I appeared, nor of what I might do next. Pixie mode is automatic, a relic from school, released to tickle any uptight armpits in a room. She was born, this pixie inside me, in response to an atmosphere of seriousness.

  On she went, wondering aloud, “So you could do the whole thing in a truck? With each of the twenty-five ponies successively loaded into the boot?”

  Frowns met frowns, a few stragglers laughing. In this way, the beginning quickly slipped from my control. That the great race was a bit ridiculous—that we were in danger of forgetting this—was the idea hiding behind my questions, but those questions probably just prompted other riders to decide I was delusional. Never mind. The following day would cast us into the grasslands.

  I walked back to the hotel. Wet streets sobbed the summer away, waiting for the winter to return with a duvet of snow. A thin lady strutted past me, coatless, perhaps unused to her own bare arms. Ulaanbaatar sits at a coordinate where the cold lasts for much of the year, long enough that the marmots outside the city begin growing new coats immediately after shedding them in July.

  The city hadn’t found a place in my foreign vision of Mongolia, yet half the country’s population lives in Ulaanbaatar. Many people have recently moved in from the steppe to trade products they once produced such as meat and wool. The city itself moved twenty-eight times before settling at its current location in 1778. What was once a mobile monastery is now a metropolis of solid foundation, no more, or less, nomadic than London or Beijing.

  No one hung about for long on the lively main street. I felt hidden among people, of whom there would soon be few, and beneath buildings, of which there would soon be none.

  IX

  Evening brought hard rain and wide-mouthed puddles. The competitors reconvened at an Indian restaurant in the city’s southeast, where I sat on a stool next to a gray-haired man named Paddy, an amateur race jockey with a family of four. His Irish accent was a lullaby to my rigid English ears. On my other side was a wooden pillar supporting the sloped ceiling, whose lack of conversation I became grateful for as dinner droned on. The thirty competitors spewed out Derby secrets as they slurped Indian cuisine. I learned a great deal about Indian food and about riding 1,000 kilometers.

  “That’s dal, a lentil dish. . . .”

  “So, always take the tracks around the mountains—it’s the best route. . . . Phwooof, you won’t handle the spice in this curry.”

  Paddy and Chloe, a rider from New Zealand, answered all my questions generously. Maybe they had visions of my clumsy frame falling from a pony the very next day.

  As food circulated, I tuned into an American voice—that of a blond girl I’d noticed in the briefing room, where she had sat at the front, arching her body back to laugh during the army doctor’s presentation. She’d drawn widespread attention at the afternoon’s end when an Australian competitor fainted and she remarked, “Well, we’re not all going to make it to the start line.”

  Here she was at dinner talking about her Derby coach. A coach? Specifically designed for one of the world’s least-known sporting events? Brought to the dinner table in oral form? I shot looks at bright-eyed Kiwi Chloe.

  By now I knew the American’s name—Devan Horn—and was fast separating it from my associations with Devon, the gently rolling English county.

  “If I don’t finish the race in six days, I’m not going home,” continued Devan, adding that she would “imprison” herself on the steppe if she didn’t meet her goal. Should we hang our heads low, or decree her abominable? It sounded hard enough to finish within the ten-day limit. No one was sure whether this Devan actually had a chance of winning or if her talents were limited to the oratory game. I diverted my attention to Chloe’s unassuming discussion of jodhpurs.

  “Mine are Lycra.”

  “Mine are full chaps,” chipped in Paddy.

  What to say? “Mine have padding on the inside seams.”

  Devan leaned across the table, replanting herself in the conversation. “Wow, padding? Watch out. You’re gonna get a huge welt pretty quick . . .”

  I looked across at her, miffed.

  “. . . like this size,” she finished.

  Perhaps she was looking out for me. But her lips were pursed as she gestured a shape the size of a mango, emphasizing the enormity of my incoming welt. I retired from dinner and bedded down by my books to dream of rotting legs.

  Devan’s tactic was admirable and, dare I say, age-old. On the campaign trail, Genghis Khan’s soldiers lit campfires, mounted dummies on spare horses, and trailed branches and bushes—all to create the impression their numbers were far greater than they actually were. I don’t know if Devan’s intimidation was intentional. It certainly lent me some fear. And if fear had propelled me through the July preparations, it might now be my undoing.

  X

  On the bus out to the steppe, where we would spend two days pre-race training, I felt I had landed myself a comrade. Natacha (“My name is spelled with a C not an S, actually”) had grown up in Paris and, like me, had a handful of brothers. At nineteen, we were among the youngest competitors attempting the race. Our hasty friendship rested on these shared facts. She chattered with a darting, expectant expression as the city fell away out the window.

  I had tried not to let anyone know my age. I was young, and young is foreign. Never trust a teenager. It was novel for me to be socializing with adults on equal terms, especially under the pretense that I could compete with them. The sport of horseback riding values experience more than youthful daring; athletes reach their peak later than they might do in other sports. Over the years, the average age of Mongol Derby competitors had been thirty-five. I feared no one would want to ride alongside a nineteen-year-old, although I’d heard that by the age of fourteen, Genghis Khan had killed one of his half brothers in a fight over hunting spoils—a horrid story, but a promising one too.

  As Natacha talked on, I fell asleep. When I woke from my snooze, the bus had left the road to rumble across grassland. About 150 kilometers southwest of Ulaanbaatar, we drew into our training camp, a series of tents and a marquee lying beneath a crescent-shaped ridge. The ridge overlooked a vast plain draped in mist, beyond which mountains kept their distance. At night, as we lay in our little tents, the mist would increase, as if asking me to notice my dread.

  That afternoon, though, we spilled from the bus and rushed to the tents like ducks to bread. I left my belongings on a patch of grass and glanced about. At the corners of my vision two horses were grazing. Green stretched in all directions, met at the horizon by blue sky. This seemed more of a space than a place, shapeless and free. I kept looking around expecting the ocean to roll in.

  If there is one piece of furniture crucial to imagining the Mongolian steppe, it’s the ger, meaning “home” in Mongolian. Usually pronounced “gaire” without the long vowel (al
most grr), it is the Mongolian equivalent of the Russian yurt: a white, circular felt tent that looks like a giant muffin crossed with a hot-air balloon. A ger is no bigger than your thumb in front of your face. Each one has a tin chimney sticking out of the center. There are no windows, for these are homes to turn you in on yourself, to let you forget the unkempt spaciousness outside them. Gers are cool in summer and warm in winter, when cow dung heats the central stove. Two poles hold up the entire tent. For some shamans, the poles are symbolic of the “world tree,” a link between the alternate realities of the underworld and the upper world.

  Genghis (or, more correctly, Chinggis) Khan is also known as the “unifier of the people of the felt-walled tents” in Mongolian. Gers rarely change in size: this is not cottage versus castle. Before the communist takeover, the last ruler of Mongolia sipped tea in a ger as humble as everyone else’s.

  A few times a year, nomadic families in Mongolia pack up their gers and move through the land in search of better pasture. Contrary to popular perception, nomads have fixed circuits—they are not drifters, and will return to similar places each year.

  I imagine gers require less effort to move than brick houses, since they’re collapsible within the hour, and the families I would meet on my journey rarely had more than three. After their passing, apparently you would hardly know they’d been. The respect for nature, or baigal—“what exists”—is such that many Mongolians on the steppe wear shoes with soft, curved soles to spare the stalks of the tiniest plants and to avoid hurting the earth.

  XI

  It is the first day of training. I stick a tentative foot through the stirrup and focus on the herder’s bushy mustache. As I prepare to pull myself up, gripping the pony’s wrinkled mane, I remind myself it is just a horse—a solid, four-legged, hairy, plant-eating, sometimes-domesticated mammal with a mane and tail. Yet my breath is scared.

  I think I felt more fear in that cold-blooded moment than I would at any point in the race. I didn’t show it. I was attached to my exterior of fearlessness. Even inside my head, I never went near phrases such as “I am scared,” “I am sad,” or “I am angry.” Perhaps this failure to emotionally engage linked me to the long tradition of British adventurers who refused to let anything flummox them, even if their partner’s leg fell off in the Arctic. I imagine this sort of disconnection from emotion was also required by their contemporaries and forebears when running an often brutal empire. Somehow, I cannot separate myself from all that.

  The pony was tiny, yet standing at his side I felt the cumulative danger of all the risky times I’d ever experienced with horses. I had been led to believe Mongolian ponies were especially life-threatening. Despite standing half asleep on the horse lines, they were rarely handled and therefore hypersensitive to human motion. If you were lucky to get on board, you would, I’d been told, certainly have no control thenceforth.

  The Right to Buck Off a Human Being is one of what I think of as the universal horse rights, and competitors had broken bones in this way at past training camps. Years earlier, I myself had broken my collarbone off a horse named Tweenie, whose sensational buck had her known locally as The Witch, a label I loved her for.

  The pony did not move when I mounted. It turned out the start-camp horses had been tamed to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s injuries. “Choo choo,” said the herder, using the equivalent of a cowboy’s “giddy-up.” My pony fell into a donkey trot.

  Riding is a dance that demands each muscle in your body answer to an ever-shifting floor. If you speak the language of trot, you will know it as the least graceful of pony paces. I rose up and down to the jarring rhythm, my vision underlined by a pair of triangular ears. If there is a grandeur associated with horseback riding, there was none here. Crawling around the basin aboard our short-legged ponies, we thrust our chests outwards, and with every rising stride, the giant, noncommittal landscape erased us.

  As the sun dropped behind the ridge, I stooped through the door of the ger at the end of the row. Soft-spoken Paddy and four others were already roosting on low beds, indulging in yet another Lycra discussion. Matthias, a forty-year-old who lay with his headlamp glowing, muttered in his German accent, “I don’t wear Dri-FIT clothes. After three days, I start to feel like a sausage.”

  I fell asleep to the noises of a party in full tilt. Someone stumbled in after midnight and collapsed next to me, snoring menacingly. From the outline of a beard I decided it had to be Todd, who herded cattle in Australia for a living and smoked a lot of cigarettes.

  The next morning, Natacha chirpily repeated the pleas of an Australian voice she had overheard behind her tent in the night: “Look, listen. I love your bum, I love your boobs, and I fucking love your personality. . . . Now just hurry up and sleep with me.”

  He was talking, Natacha suspected, to one of the vets, who did not sound keen on his advances.

  At dawn on the second training day, I got entangled in my backpack, which required the rescue of three crew members, including a thickset, heavily eyebrowed man in his early thirties called Charles. The test pony then sprang me over the plain with weathered resolve, but the saddlebag soon fell off, causing him to have a bucking fit. I jumped off before he threw me.

  Beneath the pony’s tummy, I sat untying the bag from his upper back leg, as though this were my beach spot, and he my parasol. My tent-mates abandoned me in their hurry to reach the training checkpoint, and Richard, the official race photographer, drove across the plain to magnify his view of my situation. He muttered from his jeep window as he pulled up, an easy smile behind his words.

  I mumbled back. “No, I do not know where to go. I can’t read my GPS. Is it the pink line or the blue line or the red dot? What’s that arrow? Me? Really?”

  I had been expecting, and am still expecting, someone to teach me how to use a global positioning system. Although there are many maps of Mongolia, there were no suitable GPS maps. I liked the idea of traversing a space free of the net of lines maps tended to make. The organizers had entered the coordinates of the horse-changing stations into our GPS system, but no one had mentioned what the numbers and colors meant.

  I often feel strange in groups, overwhelmed by the puzzle of humans, so I was moping at the back when the next lot of riders decided to take a deliciously straight line over the rocky ridge. Like a good sheep I went after them, ignoring the alternative track skirting the mountain. At the top, my horse refused to descend. Like the last lot, the others went on without me.

  Marooned on the peak, I dismounted and slung my body down on the stone crumble. I wasn’t aware of any rules for the training day so, relieved from the group-hurry, I began dozing. In this state I occasionally returned to the problem at hand, erupting in a spate of giggles. I hadn’t noticed until now that part of me preferred to travel slowly and catastrophically. Nor had I realized this preference would be at odds with participating in a race. It seemed a shame. Later I would learn that Devan, the well-prepared American competitor, was by now already back at camp, bulging her eyes out of her skull at the news of our group so stupidly going over the ridge.

  When I was sixteen my favorite history teacher told me to start taking myself seriously. I loved her, so I tried to listen, but I didn’t understand people who took things seriously. I especially loathed the Head Girl team, who flapped their wings like mother hens and mowed the school corridors with gravity. I couldn’t see why you would invest in life in this fashion. How did serious people fare when the world turned around to surprise them?

  Hours later, I returned to find Devan holding court on the grass. When she announced she was taking bids from people to ride with her, Tom, a tall, blond twenty-four-year-old American, casually said he might like to join Team Devan.

  She looked him up and down from her sacred patch of land. “Sure. If you can keep up.”

  By the next morning, Tom would have torn ligaments in his shoulder, not at the hands of Devan, but because he’d had the pluck to take on a Mongolian in a nighttime w
restling match. The fact that wrestling was the national sport in Mongolia had not been noted by Tom, a risk analyst by trade. What foresight Devan seemed to have.

  My own race plans were vested in a six-meter bungee rope I had nabbed on eBay. During nights spent in the open, I would tie it from my tummy to the pony’s bridle to stop the pony straying. None of the other riders believed I was serious about sleeping attached to a wild horse. They thought I’d just end up being dragged down a flinted valley and deposited in bog. It was during such conversations that I felt myself falling into their stereotypes of an English eccentric—Class B: ditzy, female. None of them were aware that I effected similar surprise back home. At the end of the first training day, a rider from California had asked if I was high, while another had simply inquired, after watching me clown about with a little boy, “Who is your mother?”

  I sank back into my heart.

  Once again I ate lunch beside Paddy, who narrowed his eyes and leaned into me to reveal his bet on Matthias, the German with no tolerance for Dri-FIT, as the likely winner of the race.

  “That Matthias, oof, he’s a real interesting guy. You know what?”

  “What?”

  He lowered his voice, “My money’s on him to win.”

  Matthias and Paddy had decided to ride together. For hours that morning they flustered about the gloomy ger, packing and repacking their luggage. Matthias epitomized the winning expert, but without Devan’s swagger. He did tai chi before breakfast both training mornings, had apparently lost 60 pounds before the race (riders weren’t allowed to weigh more than 85 kilograms, or 187 pounds, in their gear), and had clocked up over 6,400 kilometers on lone training rides in the Australian outback with his GPS. I had never ridden more than 20 kilometers at once, let alone with a GPS, and, as established, I didn’t know how to use one anyway.