Anaxilea Gladiatrix (Amazon Gladiator Book 2)

New this week!

Hungry Panther Publishing is proud to announce the release of Anaxilea: Gladiatrix! This novel marks the continuation of the GLBT oriented young adult series in book 2 of the Amazon Gladiator. Whether you're young or just young at heart, Anaxilea offers a young adult reading experience for the GLBT community. Anaxilea is the lesbian sister and gay BFF The Hunger Games never knew it had!

Anaxilea: Gladiatrix

Alex Potvin and Rebecca Murphy

Book 2 of 4 in the Amazon Gladiator series

Genres: Young Adult / Alternative History / Greek, Roman Mythology

  Price $2.99 ebook / $11.99 paperback

Available on Amazon, Nook, Kobo

Extras: map drawn by the authors and glossary of gladiator terms 

Contact Rebecca and Alex at PluckingCupidsBow@Gmail.com 

follow them on Twitter @Alex_and_Becky

and check out their web comic Cupid's Chaos

Praise for Anaxilea:

"Sharp, sharp, sharp, funny and new. Has the potential to breathe some fresh air into a saturated market.  I hope people love this as much as I did." ~Adam Sass author of Stay on Fountain: A Look at the Great Gay Tipping Point and Stay On Fountain Online Magazine

"Enjoyed it immensely--hurry up on the sequel!" ~Jean Lamb author of Dead Man's Hand

Synopsis:

Blood, sweat, and death: the currency of a Gladiatrix. Anaxilea believed she’d bargained well to save the life of her beloved Kasiani, trading what little wealth she’d earned in the arena. Treachery and rebellion within the Empire set the entire ludus down a dangerous path, across oceans and over mountains led by the enigmatic new Ludi Magister, Felixa the Royal Bastard and her insatiable thirst for glory. Each step brings them closer to freedom or death.

Milo, the fabled Olympian, promised salvation awaits them in Athens where a band of Hellenic rebels rises against the Imperium. But first the ludus must survive almost certain death within the fiercest gladiatorial games found on the outskirts of the Empire where Imperial law barely holds sway over savage civilizations and barbaric combat.

Anaxilea's tribe of gladiators threatens to tear itself apart as the flames of love, jealousy, and hatred are fanned by the winds of war.

**Disclaimer: substantial violence, mild sexuality, little language--recommended age 14 and above**

Sample Chapter 1:

Chapter 1

A breeze at the top of the pyramid blew strong with the rich, earthy scent of agriculture along the great river to the east. Even with the gentle wind it was the hottest place Anaxilea had ever been. The sun beat down on her as though the height of the pyramid brought her close enough to reach out and touch the fiery orb. Below her, the arena at Delphi wrapped around the corner of the pyramid she stood at the pinnacle of. The point at the base jutted into the center of the arena floor as if the coliseum were a ring piercing the pyramid’s nose.

The pyramid was older than the Imperium by two-thousand years. Justinus, the renowned Head Praeceptor of Ludus Dacicus and former Bull Centurion, had explained the history of the pyramid when his gladiators stood in awe of the massive structure. When the Imperium conquered the upper and lower River Kingdoms they built their coliseum to encompass part of the pyramid that housed the ancient Queen Neferukayt. Anaxilea only knew this because she was meant to portray the scholar queen in the reenactment that would open the games at Delphi.

The process of being transformed into the long-dead queen was an unpleasant one. She’d been asked for by name after her success at Neapolis. To turn her into a likeness of Neferukayt, she was dressed in short robes of a light, golden material common only to the River Kingdoms. Her head was adorned in a heavy headdress made of bronze in the shape of snakes and false black hair to conceal Anaxilea’s naturally sandy blond locks. The clothing, while strange, was not the worst of it. They’d used twisted bits of thread to pluck out all the hairs on her arms and a process called sugaring to rip the hair from her legs. They then coated her hairless body in a golden color paint that dried into a brilliant sheen. Finally, they outlined her eyes with a dark substance called kohl that framed her eyes in ornate black designs. Applying the kohl was a struggle as she was from a people who spent a good deal of time training their daughters to blind their enemies; Anaxilea still had a violent defensive reflex when anyone tried to get near her eyes and she eventually had to be held down by two large men to keep from harming the makeup artist.

She perched atop the pyramid, armed with Scyleia’s bow, surrounded by a spiked platform that positively bristled with arrows for her to fire. The bow was the last piece of Scyleia she had, her beloved childhood friend and first love who was slain trying to protect Anaxilea from the Imperial invasion. Down the sloped face of the sandstone pyramid, three gladiators of the over games stood as representatives of other ancient heroes of the lower River Kingdom. They were from different ludi than her and were all adults while she was barely sixteen summers old, so she hadn’t seen them in the arena before and she wasn’t likely to again anytime soon. The pomp of the Delphi opening ceremony was tedious and historically heavy compared to Neapolis.

One of the dark-skinned Delphinians shouted the announcements through a giant brass cone used to amplify his voice. Despite the reenactment being a celebration of a River Kingdom victory that took place thousands of years before the Imperium even existed, all the announcements were made in the Imperial tongue.

“In the twentieth year of construction on the pyramids of Delphi, a great slave rebellion arose among the workers.” The announcer gestured grandly to the small army of slaves that stood on the floor of the arena at the base of the pyramid. They were the murderers, rapists, thieves, and traitors gathered from all over the River Kingdoms and held for the sole purpose of being slain during the reenactment at Delphi. From her lofty vantage point, Anaxilea guessed there were at least two-hundred men dressed in ragged loin cloths and armed only with a smattering of sticks, although most were unarmed and some even lacked a hand—the thieves who had been caught once already, Anaxilea guessed. “After the Pharaoh was slain, the great Queen Neferukayt personally led the heroes of Delphi in defense of the city, falling back to the unfinished pyramids for a valiant last stand that finally broke the rebellion.” At this, the announcer gestured to Anaxilea, who dutifully held her bow above her head as if to gather the cheers of the crowd in its curve. A slow chant of her name rippled through the audience along with a new word: gladiatrix. The announcer waited for the chanting to subside before continuing. “If any of the condemned representing the traitors of old should crest the pyramid, their reward shall be freedom with the queen’s own pardon.”

And this was why Anaxilea was at the summit while the other three gladiators stood below her on the slope. She was the last line to prevent the convicted criminals from escaping into the city. It was a position of honor afforded to her by her success at Neapolis and her royal blood, but it was also a position of immense pressure and danger. Not that she had a choice in the matter once Ludi Magister Eligius contracted her for the opening of the games. She had her own reasons; the surviving gladiators of the reenactment received personal rewards of gold, which Anaxilea needed to continue her payments on Kasiani—her paramour, closest friend, and a remarkable murmillo gladiatrix in her own right. She would not only need to survive, she would need to thrive to collect the largest of these prizes since she’d paid nothing on her debt since Neapolis.

The sloped corner of the pyramid barred the slaves from spilling over into the edges of the coliseum with a fence of metal topped in curved spikes pointing down into the pyramid side to prevent climbing. Once the top of the coliseum ring ended a dozen or so feet below where Anaxilea stood, there were no other impediments to escape besides Anaxilea’s arrows.

On the three similar platforms along the sheer face, the trio of over games gladiators readied themselves for the charge of convicted felons. Nearest to the base of the pyramid stood a massive man, a samnite without a shield, armed with a pole as long as himself that had a hammer head on one end and an axe blade upon the other. Up the pyramid from this man was a murmillo with a throwing hoplite and a hand axe. He was armed similarly to Kasiani, but he was huge by comparison and a good deal faster in the twirling of his axe and facing of his shield. Directly below Anaxilea, at the platform in the narrowest point where the coliseum edges connected to the pyramid, stood a female dimachaerus armed with twin bronze swords shaped like forward facing hooks. Anaxilea guessed the woman to be a Scythian, although it looked as though she too had been plucked of body hair and painted gold. None of the gladiators were armored as none of the slaves attempting to escape held edged weapons; Anaxilea actually felt a little naked without the steel scales and purple leather armor that typically covered her left side.

The gladiators looked like the heroes of old and stood grandly against the horde, but what the audience couldn’t see in the spectacle was the truth of the situation. The condemned masses on the arena floor had a slim chance at freedom while the gladiators that faced them did not. Anaxilea was the Queen Neferukayt in every appearance except the manacle around her right ankle that anchored her to the platform. From the top of the pyramid, she could see similar bonds on the other gladiators, but she doubted the people within the arena could see the chains binding the gladiators to their fate.

She’d trained for months since Neapolis. She could always fire quickly, but now she could fire more accurately. Certainly she was chained while her enemy was not, but she hoped she could fill the air with enough arrows to prevent any of them from learning how vulnerable she truly was while tethered and unarmored.

The horns bellowed along the sides of the coliseum. The hard men on the arena floor charged up the side of the pyramid like a waterfall of humanity flowing against gravity. The slope of the pyramid slowed them some and offered poor footing for the climb. Some attempted to swamp the first gladiator in the row while others moved to skirt around him. The massive man with the strange hammer and axe combination cut a huge, bloody swath of destruction with every swing. He twirled his colossal weapon with straining, powerful muscles in his arms and shoulders, smashing skulls and cleaving limbs whenever a convict blundered into his range.

The swarm seemed endless and while the first gladiator killed many with his twirling hammer and axe combination, the vast majority of the condemned slaves slipped by him on the outside of the pyramid’s widest point. A few broke away from the stream in an attempt to attack the murmillo. He threw his shield as Anaxilea had seen Kasiani do. The bronze disk shaped like the fiery face of the sun shot out with far more speed and force than Anaxilea had ever seen a shield thrown. The disk cut easily through two men before reaching the end of its tether. The murmillo yanked the shield back, catching a third man with the bladed edge on the shield’s return trip. The shield spent less than a heartbeat in the murmillo’s hand before he whipped it out again to the other side with the same brutal result of cleaving limbs and cutting necks.

The slaves were finally in easy range of her bow. Anaxilea tore her focus from the gladiators below to pick targets. She drew arrow after arrow from the quivers lined up in front of her and fired again and again into the approaching rush. She had become far more accurate with practice, but she didn’t need to be that day. Every arrow she loosed found flesh as if she were firing into an ocean of humanity.

The dimachaerus woman below her met the rush of murderers and rapists with a flurry of bladed attacks when the rising tide of condemned slaves reached her. She danced away from clubs and punches, slashed with her swords at the numerous open targets around her, and added an occasional kick from her free leg. The woman had a longer chain on her manacle than any of the other gladiators, but she also seemed to be struggling more with the fettering. Her fighting style appeared to require a freedom of movement the chain wouldn’t allow and even with Anaxilea’s added help of a few well-placed arrows, it became a losing proposition of too many dead bodies around her to continue her sword dance.

Anaxilea’s heart thundered as she attempted to pour even more arrows into the flood of murderous men encircling the dimachaerus. A couple of the slaves slipped around the side, stumbling through the blood, limbs, and bodies coating the face of the pyramid to finally grab the chain holding the swordswoman. They yanked at the bloody chain, staggering her just enough for a few of the larger men with clubs to gain the advantage. They struck the dimachaerus along the arms and shoulders, knocked her swords from her hands, and dove upon her. Anaxilea fired an arrow through the skull of the first man to wrap his hands around the dimachaerus’s throat, but she could not fell them all. One of the slaves came away with a sword. Anaxilea put two arrows in this man’s chest. She lost track of the other sword in the crush of humanity. The men washed over the fallen woman below her and struggled to continue their trek to the top of the pyramid where Anaxilea stood. Above the sound of men shouting, the crowd cheering, and battle still being waged by the other two gladiators, Anaxilea thought she heard the woman screaming.

A dozen dirty, angry men, blood splattered and armed with clubs, broke from the pack to charge her platform. She felled most of them as they struggled at the top of the steeply sloped sides where the sun and wind made the stones brittle and crumbly. Two reached the edge of her platform uninjured. She swung the upper arm of Scyleia’s bow hard at the first man’s face, caving the side of his skull with the ironwood weapon. Anaxilea had not known that hope could become crazed, but that was what the man’s face had displayed the moment before she killed him. The other man rushed from her blind side, making an awkward swing of his club. She saw the attack coming in the shadow he cast across her platform. She ducked under the truncheon aimed at the back of her head and lunged at her attacker. He was too close to strike with her bow, but her right hand was as much of a weapon as any dagger. She raked her hand across his face, nearly popping out his left eye with her middle finger. He made a clumsy grab for her arm when she brought it back around for another attack. She let him grasp her elbow even as her fingers enclosed his left ear. When he tried to pull her hand away, her grip tightened and pulled in the same direction, feeling the ear tearing under her hand as he practically helped her pull the ear from his head. The man shrieked and grabbed at the bleeding hole behind his temple. Anaxilea drove her knee into his groin and used her bow to lever him off the platform. The man bounced and rolled down the face of the pyramid.

Anaxilea tossed aside the man’s ear and reached for another arrow. The pyramid, formerly beautiful and golden in the desert sun, was blood-stained and covered in more foulness than most Imperial sewers would see in a month. The transition was so fast that Anaxilea had to marvel at it. She picked off the handful of men still trying to escape over the sides below her, but the majority of the men didn’t seem interested in cresting the pyramid anymore. The handful of slaves still trying to rush over the top made for easy targets in their slow, awkward climb. They were close at hand, desperately blundering forward, and didn’t have the faintest clue how to make themselves harder to hit. Anaxilea almost felt bad for them until she remembered the chain on her ankle. They did not deserve the chance at freedom that should rightly be hers and so she would deny it to them as they had committed crimes while she had not.

The wave of slaves had moved entirely beyond the lowest gladiator who stood at the ready, covered in blood and gore, yelling taunts for them to come to him. The majority of the horde of slaves had stopped in the center of the pyramid’s face, but weren’t attacking the murmillo holding the middle gap. In fact, the men looked organized, using the bodies of their fallen to shield others from the thrown, bladed shield that kept darting out toward them like a deadly viper’s tongue. Anaxilea saw what they were doing, but couldn’t make sense of their actions until it was too late to do anything about it.

The cluster of slaves broke from the edge of the fence they were pushing at and suddenly a string of dead slaves, bound together by a crude rope, went rolling down the face of the pyramid. The weight of limp bodies tugged once at the end of the string and then came away with a section of the spiked fence keeping the slaves away from the audience. The wall guarding the citizenry was apparently stout against being pushed in, but not against being pulled out. The surviving slaves abandoned their efforts of going over the top of the pyramid past Anaxilea and instead flooded into the arena seating. Anaxilea stood for a moment, too shocked to even fire anymore. By the time she regained her senses, the remaining hundred or so slaves had pushed entirely off the pyramid and were rampaging through the audience, well out of her range to do anything.

Anaxilea couldn’t decide if she would have helped at that point even if she could. The arena patrons came to see blood, and they were certainly getting their money’s worth when the slaughter came directly to their seats. Guards struggled through the panicked audience, attempting to sort out the slaves from the patrons. Everyone was running, some to escape, some to regain order, and others to kill. Anaxilea’s eyes sweeping over the audience caught on the lone man in the entire arena who was not running. He was tall, slender, and bronze of skin. He looked Imperian with his auburn hair cut short and swept forward, but his face looked more like Caio’s. He had the sharp, hawkish features of a Gaul despite everything else about him saying he was a northern Imperian like Kasiani. The man was not directing the chaos perpetrated by the slaves that had escaped into the coliseum seating, but nor was he fleeing it or being attacked by it.

Anaxilea remained focused on the tall man even as the guards gained control of the arena section the slaves flooded into. The tall man walked with no more concern required of a stroll through a garden, exiting via one of the vomitorium arches. Without the man to stare at any longer, Anaxilea studied the rest of the arena. Only one section, an eighth of the total, had been invaded, but that hadn’t contained the panic. People in sections on the far end of the amphitheater rioted, trampled, and fled, creating far more havoc than the lone incursion warranted.

The sun dipped low in the west behind her before the coliseum was fully delivered and the slave handlers of Delphi scrambled up to release her from her chain. She didn’t think any of the slaves escaped, at least not past her they hadn’t, but none of the arena staff that came to escort her from the pyramid seemed jubilant about that success.

Justinus awaited her at the mouth of the passage leading back down into the gladiator pits. Slave handlers from the Delphi coliseum and guards from Ludus Dacicus escorted her through the labyrinth of dark hallways toward the enclosed pits outside the arena that held the gladiators waiting to compete.

“The entire complex is under lockdown while they contain and account for all the slaves,” Justinus said.

“I thought any escaped slaves would be granted freedom during the reenactment,” Anaxilea said. She thought specifically of the second man who reached her platform. The first likely died from the skull fracture delivered by her bow, but the other man, despite losing an ear and suffering two very sore testicles probably survived his first encounter with an Amazon.

“Only if they made it over the top,” Justinus said. “Any taken alive now will know torture to find out who planned this attack. The pull-down technique used on the fences was one I have seen before and certainly wasn’t accidental.”

“You saw it in Gaul,” Anaxilea mused.

“Yes, how did you know?”

“A guess only.” It was a stretch to connect the calm man in the midst of the madness to the rebellion. She also had to admit that she wasn’t the best judge of male features. Just because he looked like a Gaul to her did not mean he was one. Still, she was in possession of information that might be interconnected and important. She would need help in figuring out what to do with it.