Character guide

Ras Thavas

major

Also known as Thavas, old Ras Thavas, the master surgeon

Ras Thavas rules a remote tower where he buys, trades, and transplants living bodies with the calm of a man changing coats. He keeps his own thoughts sealed like one of his blood jars, and he chooses the Earthman Ulysses Paxton as his apprentice precisely because Paxton's alien mind stays unreadable. His cold rationality collides with Paxton's sentimentality, and his refusal to die drives every bargain he makes.

Gor Hajus

supporting

Gor Hajus joins Paxton's escape as a man who has killed for hire and expects to die for it, yet he proves steadier than any noble aboard the stolen flier. He works the idol's hidden mechanisms and guards the prisoners while the strange company sleeps in the marshes, treating each task as a contract he intends to honor. His presence turns a desperate flight into something like a fighting chance.

Dar Tarus

major

Also known as Phundahl, Dar Tarus of Phundahl

Dar Tarus was a young warrior of Phundahl until Xaxa's favorite, Sag Or, took his beautiful body for himself, leaving Dar Tarus trapped in Sag Or's dissipated frame. He joins Paxton's conspiracy with a personal stake no one else can match, studying his own stolen face with a mixture of vanity and grief. His claim to the throne of Phundahl gives the plot its political spine.

Valla Dia

major

Also known as Valla, Dia

Valla Dia is the victim whose suffering gives Paxton's mission its moral weight: her fair body now belongs to Xaxa, while her mind endures inside an old and hideous corpse. She kneels before the idol of Tur and speaks Xaxa's lines with a composure that shames the woman who stole her face. Her restoration is the promise the whole conspiracy is built to keep.

Xaxa

major

Also known as Jeddara, the Jeddara Xaxa, Jeddara of Phundahl

Xaxa governs Phundahl through fear and the worship of the idol Tur, and she has purchased Valla Dia's youthful body to escape her own aged flesh. When she wakes bound on the flier, she tries to hurl herself overboard rather than live again in her old and hideous corpse, revealing a vanity as ruthless as her rule. Her capture and unmasking drive the story's central confrontation.

Hovan Du

supporting

Also known as Du

Hovan Du is one of Ras Thavas's strangest experiments, a white ape whose skull holds a portion of human mind alongside simian instinct. On the flight through the Great Toonolian Marshes he finds fruit and nuts for the fugitives and leads them to fresh water, his ape senses serving where human knowledge cannot. His divided self embodies the novel's question of where the person truly lives.

The Great Tur

supporting

Also known as Tur, Great Tur

Tur rules Phundahl as its supreme religious figure, a jade-and-gold idol whose pronouncements shape law, war, and the daily dread of his worshippers. Yet the voice of god belongs to Xaxa, who manages him as a puppet and guards her monopoly on his ear. He matters because the gulf between his godhead and his helplessness is the engine of Phundahl's corruption — and the thing an outsider must learn to see through.

Bal Zak

supporting

Bal Zak commands the Vosar and moves through Toonol's landing towers with the ease of a man who knows every guard's weakness. He is practical rather than heroic — he helps fugitives not from sentiment but because he can, and because the scheme amuses him. His willingness to risk his neck for strangers gives the escape from Toonol its first real chance, and his dry counsel keeps the fugitives from mistaking courage for a plan.

Sag Or

supporting

Also known as Sag

Sag Or belongs to the priestly class that surrounds the Great Tur, and he treats Phundahl's faith as an instrument to be wielded rather than a truth to be served. Where Xaxa schemes for power, he schemes for the temple's survival, and he regards the arrival of a surgeon who can raise the dead as a threat to the entire order. His opposition gives the story its institutional antagonist: not a villain with a knife, but a system with a congregation.

John Carter

minor

Also known as Carter

The legendary Warlord of Mars who appears late in the story.

Vad Varo

major

Vad Varo wakes on Mars in a body not his own, apprenticed to the greatest — and most morally indifferent — surgeon on the planet. He carries an Earthman's horror at what Ras Thavas does casually, and a surgeon's knowledge that he can do it too, which is precisely what makes him valuable and hunted. His foreignness is his weakness and his leverage: no one in Toonol or Phundahl can predict a man who has no ancestors here to answer to.

Mu Tel

supporting

Mu Tel opens his palace and his instruments to the stranger, letting him watch Earth's trenches from a darkened auditorium a world away. He is generous, curious, and unshakably cynical — he tells Vad Varo that war is nature's natural state and peace merely the interval for preparing the next one. His hospitality gives the narrator both a view of home and a sobering lesson in how Barsoomians think about the violence he has just escaped.

Yamdor

minor

A city and its ruler, mentioned as a location.

Vobis Kan

minor

Also known as Kan

A Phundahlian warrior and guard.

Kor San

minor

A minor Phundahlian character.

Kara Vasa

minor

A Phundahlian priest.

Jal Had

minor

Also known as Jal

A Toonolian warrior.

Turgan

minor

A Phundahlian guard.