Nemone extended a hand and laid it on his, a soft, warm hand that trembled just a little. "I am going to give you your freedom," she said, "but on one condition."
"And what is that?" asked the ape-man.
"That you remain here, that you do not try to leave Onthar—or me." Her voice was eager and just a little husky, as though she spoke under suppressed emotion.
Tarzan remained silent. He would not promise, and so he did not speak. He realized, too, how easy it would be to remain if Nemone bid one do so. She fascinated him; she seemed to exercise a subtle influence, mysterious, hypnotic; yet he was determined to make no promise.
"I will make you a noble of Cathne," whispered Nemone. She was sitting erect now, her face close to Tarzan's. He could feel the warmth of her body close to his; the aura of some exotic scent was in his nostrils; her fingers closed upon his arm with a fierceness that hurt. "I will have made for you helmets of gold and habergeons of ivory, the most magnificent in Cathne; I will give you lions, fifty, a hundred; you shall be the richest, the most powerful noble of my court!"
The lord of the jungle felt weak beneath the spell of her burning eyes. "I do not want such things," he said.
Her soft arm crept up about his neck. A tender light, that was new to them, welled in the eyes of Nemone, the Queen of Cathne. "Tarzan!" she whispered.
And then a door at the far end of the chamber opened and a negress entered. She had been very tall, but now she was old and bent; her scraggly wool was scant and white. Her withered lips were twisted into something that might have been either a snarl or a grin, revealing her toothless gums. She stood in the doorway leaning upon a staff and shaking her head, an ancient, palsied hag.
At the interruption Nemone straightened and looked around. The expression that had transformed and softened her countenance was swept away by a sudden wave of rage, inarticulate but no less terrible.
The old hag tapped upon the floor with her staff; her head nodded ceaselessly like that of some grotesque and horrible doll, and her lips were still contorted in what Tarzan realized now was no smile but a hideous snarl. "Come!" she cackled. "Come! Come! Come!"