Chapter One
The Last Distillation
The road into the valley had been improved since Leila's childhood, which meant it now took only four hours from the airport and only one of them was frightening, and she drove it with the windows sealed and the air conditioning on, out of habit, the professional habit of a nose that worked in a controlled environment, until the last pass.
At the last pass, where the road crested and the valley opened below in its long green seam between red walls of mountain, terraced fields stitched with silver water lines, the village of Timaziri stacked pink and ochre on its spur above the river, she stopped the car, because the arithmetic of her own body gave her no choice. She stood at the roadside in the enormous evening light. And she rolled down every window the car possessed, which is a thing you can also do with yourself.
April. Early April, the buds a week out. The valley did not smell of roses yet; it smelled of the week before roses, green water and warm adobe and almond leaf and the particular mineral breath of the river, and Leila Benhaddou, who could name four hundred aroma molecules blind and had built accords for three continents, stood at the guardrail with her eyes shut doing something she had not done in a laboratory in years.
Not analysing. Recognising.
"Okay, Grand mère," she said, to the valley, in the French of her working life, and then, because the valley deserved its own language, in the Tamazight of her milk teeth: "Okay. I'm here. Whatever this is, I'm here."
