Warhoon Great Games Rules

The Warhoon Great Games are a ten-day public contest in which prisoners and animals are made to fight, and only the final victor receives freedom. Held before the assembled Warhoon hordes, the games convert captivity into a staged sequence of eliminations: each round narrows the field, while the prospect of release is reserved for one survivor. When John Carter and Kantos Kan reach the final contest, they turn its apparent rules against their captors and use a feigned death to create a chance to escape.

Setting and Arrangement

The games take place in an enormous amphitheater excavated below ground in the ruins of an ancient city. Debris has partly filled the structure, obscuring its original size, but it can still accommodate the twenty thousand Warhoons gathered for the event. The arena itself is uneven and poorly maintained. Stones taken from ruined buildings form a barrier intended to keep combatants and animals from escaping into the audience; cages at either end hold the prisoners and beasts until their turns.

Those confined together include Carter and Kantos Kan, as well as calots, thoats, mad zitidars, green warriors, women from other hordes, and unfamiliar wild beasts of Barsoom. The arrangement places people and animals within the same spectacle and subjects both to the same elimination process. The cages are not merely holding places: they make the contestants visible to the crowd while keeping each group in reserve until the games call for it.

Rules and Progression

Kantos Kan explains the governing rule while he and Carter are imprisoned together. At the end of the day, one prisoner is to win freedom, while the others are expected to die in the arena. Winners of separate contests are matched against one another until only two contestants remain; the winner of their final encounter is released, whether human or animal. On the following morning, new victims fill the cages, and the process continues through the ten days of the games.

The contests are organized as a succession of matchups rather than one undifferentiated battle. At a signal from Dak Kova, a dozen green Martian females are driven into the arena, each given a dagger, and a pack of twelve calots is released against them. Carter turns away as the animals attack. When he looks back after Kantos Kan tells him the contest is over, three calots remain alive; the women, in the narrator’s assessment, have fought effectively, but the dogs are the victors. A mad zitidar is then set among the remaining dogs, and further contests continue through the long day.

Contestants, Spectators, and Violence

The audience fills the available seating within an hour. Dak Kova occupies a raised platform at the center of one side, accompanied by his jeds and chieftains, while the assembled Warhoons watch from around the arena. The crowd’s response makes clear that the games are entertainment as well as a method of punishment: its yells and laughter accompany the contest between the women and the calots, and it applauds Carter when he wins.

Carter is matched first against men and then against beasts. Armed with a longsword, he has an advantage in agility and usually in strength, so he survives each encounter and repeatedly wins the audience’s applause. Near the end of the day, some spectators call for him to be removed from the arena and admitted to the Warhoon hordes. The call reflects how the games can make a captive’s performance an object of public admiration, even though that acclaim does not alter the lethal rules governing his participation.

The Final Matches and Escape

Three contestants remain: Carter, Kantos Kan, and a powerful green warrior from a northern horde. The green warrior has defeated his earlier opponents, and Carter doubts that Kantos Kan can overcome him. Kantos Kan, though victorious in his own earlier contests, has won some by narrow margins, especially against green warriors; he is also markedly smaller than his final opponent, standing just under six feet to the other warrior’s nearly sixteen.

Kantos Kan’s victory comes through a throwing technique Carter has not seen before. From roughly twenty feet away, Kantos Kan draws his sword arm far behind his shoulder and hurls the weapon point-first at the green warrior, killing him and advancing to the final contest. The games’ rules now require Carter and Kantos Kan to fight for the promised freedom. Rather than try to kill one another, they prolong the encounter as evening approaches, hoping darkness will offer a means of escape. The audience senses their reluctance to fight and howls in anger when neither delivers a fatal thrust.

As darkness falls, Carter whispers a plan. Kantos Kan places his sword between Carter’s left arm and body; Carter clamps the blade there and falls as if mortally wounded. Kantos Kan then performs the appearance of delivering a final blow, completing the deception while the crowd can no longer see clearly. Carter whispers that Kantos Kan should claim his freedom and search for him in the hills east of the city. Kantos Kan leaves to do so, and the contest’s apparent conclusion gives the two captives an opening beyond the arena’s rules: one can pass as dead while the other departs under the cover of victory.