Читать книгу Rough Magic - Lara Prior-Palmer - Страница 22

XIV

Home time. Teatime. This must be more or less the finish line. Waiting for the vet, I breathe in the cheese scent of Brolly’s goatskin bridle. There is something cozy about the smell of decay.

Seven riders are still at the urtuu waiting for their ponies’ heart rates to drop. Time never ceases in the race—each minute waiting for a horse’s heart is a minute wasted or savored: it depends on whether you prefer your legs apart or together. Yesterday Maggie the steward told me that most of the horses ridden in each Derby—nearly a thousand are gathered in its name—have heart rates that fall below 64 beats per minute within ten minutes, unless the weather is this kind of despicable sauna. Even Brolly, who stands before me having done so little, takes twelve minutes to go from 72 to 64 bpm.

I find a single bar of signal on my phone while waiting and use it to text the Mongol Derby blog. My message is only a sentence. It doesn’t dare mention the race. Maybe that’s because I feel the Derby might be an illusion and I want to exist beyond it. Instead, I complain about the plums ripening without me at home. Picking plums is one of only two moments in life in which I really feel at ease, the other being when I’m lost in the troughs of my yawns. Every year I involve myself in the plums’ journeys from March to August—green to purple, hard to soft, healthy to diseased—their changing skins mapping the arc of each summer, their flesh tasting of sun and birthday and moments alone.

Tom hangs in a sweat nearby, his torn shoulder crumpled into his sling, his other arm draped over his steed’s neck. Richard the photographer mills about, his gray hair striking upwards. I see Maggie fix her eyes on me. She orders Brolly to trot. I wake him up and we hop into rhythm.

“Your horse,” she booms after ten strides, “is lame.”

I wince. Lame? Limping and injured? My stomach recoils. I was a bit suspicious two hours ago when Richard drove back past in his jeep.

“He feels lame!” I’d yelled to him. “Does he look lame?”

“Looks fine.”

To avoid a penalty we’re supposed to dismount lame horses and walk them to the nearest station. I should never have gotten back on. Richard chips into Maggie’s glare and decides my fate.

“No, no. T’sallright, Maggie. I passed them earlier. Pony was sound.” His faint Irish accent unstiffens the consonants.

Maggie turns her attention elsewhere. Why she’ll take the word of a photographer, I don’t know. I untack the little gray—who will now have days, or even months, off. Bye-bye, Brolly.

In a few weeks’ time I’ll make an inventory of the ponies I’ve ridden, in case I forget any of them. 1: Umbrella/Brolly—Small. Gray. Lame.

After a certain number of days, straggling riders get kicked out of the race because the crew cannot monitor the field if it spreads out too much. I’ll be the first cast-off if I don’t get a move on. But where are the toilets? I’m looking for a complex similar to that of start camp. When a rider points me to a lone hole in the ground concealed by a flap of material, I decide I’ll wait for the next station.

I stride up the horse line, a rope suspended between poles, and pause at each pony tied to the rope—brown, gray, spotted, black, then red. Which of these stumpy legs is willing? I’m seeking someone who will bolt me to the next station, but they all stand in sun-smothered slumbers, occasionally shaking their manes to throw off the flies. Before I left I asked my aunt if she had advice on picking a semiwild horse from a selection of up to forty. “Bloody hell, no,” she replied.

Behind the lines, the herders are laughing. Maybe I look like an idiot, I don’t know. When I point at a big brown pony with a red noseband, one man in a gray cloak cackles louder. I frown and turn to his son, whose smirk is just as strong. It seems they have secrets about my desired mount. I look back to the pony’s eye.

The herders do know all sorts of things; for example, horses with pointy ears tend to have healthier kidneys, which is news to me. They may know of an affliction in this pony. Or they may be amused at the thought of a girl handling him. Some Mongolian writers say women are respected here (whatever that has ever meant), as they were during the medieval empire, when they exercised power—Töregene Khatun, the wife of Chinggis Khan’s son, ruled as regent for five years—but perhaps they’re not always so welcome on the horse-racing scene. There was only one girl among many boys in the short race we saw at start camp.

Though many people outside of Ulaanbaatar know how to ride, the warrior arts are reserved for men. Lucy, the past competitor I spoke to on the phone, said herders, when asked, sometimes recommend slower horses to female riders out of concern for their safety. I leave the herders’ lingering laughter and scoop up my saddle to lay it on the brown pony’s back.

Saddles in England are traditionally leather and saddles in Mongolia are wood, but we’re using nylon endurance saddles. We also have two girths to stop them from slipping around to the horses’ underbellies, since a capsized rider is a classic equestrian accident.

When I return from refilling my collapsible water bottle, an English competitor in sunglasses shouts over to me.

“Wait for me while I go to the loo, yah?”

The vowels of her refined English accent resonate across the heat. At home I wouldn’t have noticed her voice—it simply echoes mine—but out here I envisage a British flag and awful cries of Empire! Empire! or War? Why not!

Distance has a strange ability to make matters more acute. I’m uneasy about my Britishness, and its link to the quest for empire—a past long gone, but not gone yet, a past that feels, in this moment, to be one of its defining features.

The English competitor is visibly still at the toilet when I scribble my signature on the sign-out sheet. When a journalist publishes an article online about my attempt at the race, she writes it in my first-person voice, using tenuous quotes like If someone is injured or in trouble of course I’ll stop, but I don’t plan to wait for anyone who can’t find their gloves. It makes me sound ruthless. I mean, it’s true I don’t wait for the English competitor, but she will find others to ride with—many at this urtuu are stagnant in the midday sun, still awaiting their horses’ recoveries.

My other option is to hang around and continue alone in last position to satisfy the part of me that likes being slow and disaster-ridden. Aunt Lucinda still enters some competitions, but with a less good horse than those she used to ride, and never for a placing or a prize.

“Are you sure you want to compete at Blenheim to be bottom?” her half sister Karol asked her this year.

“Well, someone has to be bottom,” she replied.