Panthans

 

Panthans are mercenaries or “wandering soldiers of fortune are common upon Barsoom, where most men love to fight.  They sell their services wherever war exists, and in the occasional brief intervals when there is no organized warfare between the red nations, they join one of the numerous expeditions that are constantly being dispatched against the green men in protection of the waterways that traverse the wilder portions of the globe.

“When their service is over they discard the metal of the nation they have been serving until they shall have found a new master.   In the intervals they wear no insignia, their war-worn harness and grim weapons being sufficient to attest their calling.

“The suggestion was a happy one, and Carthoris embraced the chance it afforded to account satisfactorily for himself. There was, however, a single drawback.  In times of war such panthans as happened to be within the domain of a belligerent nation were compelled to don the insignia of that nation and fight with her warriors.” 

“To escape the Dusarians might prove an easy matter; and then again it might not. Should they suspect his loyalty (and the loyalty of an impressed panthan was always open to suspicion), he might not find an opportunity to elude their vigilance until after the termination of the war, which might occur within days, or, again, only after long and weary years of bloodshed.

“He recalled that history recorded wars in which actual military operations had been carried on without cessation for five or six hundred years, and even now there were nations upon Barsoom with which Helium had made no peace within the history of man."     (TMM XI)

 

“They are generally supposed to be men who have flown from the wrath of their own Jeddaks or the justice of their own courts, but there is among them a sprinkling of adventurous souls who have adopted this calling because of the thrills and excitement it offers.  While they are well paid, they are also great gamblers and notorious spenders, with the result that they are almost always without funds and often reduced to strange expedients for the gaining of livelihood between engagements; a fact which would give plausibility to our possession of a trained ape.”  (MM IX)

 

 

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