WYTHEVILLE -- She's not Conan, and she's not even Russell Crowe, but Kim Headlee's female gladiator could probably hold her own with either of them.

"Liberty" is her name, as well as the title of the recently published novel by Headlee, writing as Kimberly Iverson.

"As far as I know, this is the only novel about a female gladiator that has been published to date," Headlee said.

She may well be right. A search of the Amazon and Barnes & Noble online sites turned up Gillian Bradshaw's 2003 "Render Unto Caesar," but its hero is a Greek trader. The female gladiator who becomes his protector is a secondary character.

A Google search likewise turns up no competitors, but does yield news reports about a grave in a paupers' cemetery outside London excavated in 1996 and examined in depth over the next four years.

All that remained was a pelvic bone, shown to be female, but accompanying debris -- such as a lamp depicting a gladiator -- indicated that the Museum of London archaeologists had uncovered the first female gladiator ever found.

A friend from Montana sent Headlee a newspaper clipping about the discovery, with a note saying, "Kim, this looks like it would be your kind of thing."

"Yeah, it would," agreed Headlee, who still has the clipping.

The information provided the genesis for her novel. "I did people research: Who was governor of Britain at the time? Who was the emperor?" she said.

She found "a lot of stuff" on gladiators after the Russell Crowe movie, "Gladiator" became so popular in 2000.

Headlee advanced the time of the London grave by 90 years because she wanted to bring her story into the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a sympathetic Roman emperor. The earlier ones from when Rome occupied England "were both whack jobs, and I didn't want a whack-job emperor," she said.

In Headlee's story, the gladiator -- dubbed Libertas, or Liberty -- helps to save the life of the emperor. "I fudged on her remains a little bit just to get the story I wanted to tell," Headlee said.

She set her story around 160 A.D.

"That was the precise period when a physician named Galen was practicing in ancient Rome," she said, which was a bit of serendipity. He was a father of modern medicine and practiced on gladiators, she said. "I included as many actual events as I could, and people."

The woman who would become known as Libertas -- a name Headlee has on her license plate -- begins life as a farm girl, and kills a warrior woman when raiders attack her family's home. From there, the story takes her to the London arena and into contact with the son of Britain's governor. The two of them are drawn into a plot to overthrow the emperor, even as they are being drawn to each other.

Although billed as "The stirring debut novel of ancient Rome by talented newcomer Kimberly Iverson," this is actually Headlee's second novel. Her first, "Dawnflight," was published in 1994 under her married name and won a number of literary awards.

Iverson was her name before she and Chris Headlee were married. The new name all has to do with publishing strategies, she said.

"Dawnflight" is Headlee's take on Guinevere, the wife of the legendary King Arthur. "I realized Guinevere got a bad rap," she said. "So that was my mission in 'Dawnflight.' "

Headlee's desire to write goes back to her childhood.

"When I was about 7, I had a very vivid dream that had several plot points to it," Headlee said. "I remember waking up and wanted to write the story down."

At age 9, she read Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur" from cover to cover, and was taken with the saga of Arthur and Guinevere.

She immediately began writing her own version of the story. "So I've been a writer almost as far back as I can remember," she said.

Even then, she felt Guinevere and Arthur should have been depicted as equals. "I had envisioned their relationship like that of Napoleon and Josephine," she said. "My Arthur character draws on her for advice."

Headlee met her husband when she attended the U.S. Air Force Academy for two years. She graduated in 1989 from Colorado Technical College and worked as a computer software engineer. She also joined a choir as a classical oratorio singer, evidence of which lingers today in her singing message on her answering machine.

She does her writing in a building not far from her home just outside Wytheville. "My commute is exactly through three pastures," she said.

Once there, she has no satellite dish, no telephone (except a cellphone for emergencies) or other distractions. "That's where we lived for a month until we finished the house," she said.

Her writing retreat contains artwork she likes, Arthurian fiction, research books and music, she said.

What kind of music? Well, the classical pieces by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov are favorites, for a good reason: She is the composer's great-great-great niece. If the book is ever picked up for a movie, she said, she would like to see his music used in it.