Carta murmured soothing nonsense words. But Regina didn’t feel distressed. This little scene, the lanterns and musicians and mourners gathered around a hole in the ground, was too strange to be upsetting. And besides, the awkward thing on the litter didn’t seem to have any connection to her father.

Jovian placed a coin, a whole solidus, in his brother’s mouth, payment for the ferryman. Then the body was lowered, a little clumsily, into the coffin. Marcus was wearing his best shoes, Regina noticed. Well, you couldn’t go into the afterlife without shoes. Under Aetius’s orders, Marcus was placed facedown.

One by one the mourners came up and dropped tokens into the coffin. There were remembrances of Marcus’s life, like farming tools, and even a handful of tesserae from an unfinished mosaic; and there were objects to ease the passage to the afterlife, a vial of wine, a haunch of pork, some candles, a little bell to ward off evil.

Regina got a little upset now, for she had brought nothing to give her father. “Nobody told me!” she hissed to Carta, only to be admonished for making a noise.

She pulled away from Carta and looked around the mausoleum. In grassy corners she found some mayweed, poppy, and knapweed. The petals were closed and heavy with dew, for it was night. Still, she picked the wildflowers and dropped them into the grave. Perhaps they would open in the afterlife, where it was surely light all the time.

A load of chalk, pale in the starlight, was dumped into the coffin, to preserve the body. Finally the coffin lid was lowered and the heaps of earth beside the open grave briskly returned. The soil smelled damp and rich. A simple tombstone was placed over the fresh earth—smaller than her grandfather’s, for, as she had been told, such things were very expensive nowadays. She bent to read its inscription, but the writing was fine and in Latin, and it was too dark.

At the end of the burial, the mourners departed for the funerary banquet back at the villa. Regina looked for her mother. She couldn’t see her.

But Aetius was here. He got to his haunches and faced Regina. He had something in his hand that he hid from her; she wondered if it was a toy, a present. But his broad face was dark.

“Little one, you have to understand what has happened here. Do you know why your father died?”

“I saw the blood.”

“Yes. You saw the blood. Regina, Marcus followed a goddess called Cybele.”

“Cybele and Atys. Yes.”