Mossflower recap

Mossflower Wood is held by the wildcats of the fortress Kotir, where the ailing warlord Verdauga rules until his daughter Tsarmina takes the fortress for herself, imprisons her brother Gingivere and tightens her grip on the woodlanders. Martin, a wandering young mouse, is captured, has his father's sword broken by Tsarmina and is thrown into the dungeons, where he meets the thief Gonff. The two escape and join the woodland resistance based at Brockhall under Bella the badger, who tells Martin of her father, Boar the Fighter, lord of the mountain Salamandastron in the west. Martin, Gonff and Dinny the mole travel west to seek his help, gathering allies on the road, and at the mountain Boar forges Martin a new sword from star metal before dying in a battle against sea rats. While they are away, the woodlanders starve Kotir out and the moles dig channels to turn the river against it. Martin returns as the fortress floods and sinks, and Tsarmina, terrified of water all her life, drowns with it. On the ruins the freed woodlanders and a company of mice from Loamhedge begin building Redwall Abbey.

This story is set generations before Redwall Abbey exists. Everything a listener needs is introduced here; no earlier book is required. It is worth knowing only that Martin the Warrior is the figure Redwall later remembers as its founding protector, the mouse whose sword hangs in the Abbey's hall in the books set long afterwards, and that the wood the story takes place in is the same Mossflower that surrounds the Abbey in those later tales.

Mossflower Wood is occupied territory. The wildcat warlord Verdauga Greeneyes holds it from Kotir, a fortress garrisoned by weasels, stoats, ferrets and rats, and the woodlanders pay tribute they cannot afford. Verdauga is old and ill, and his two children are already positioning themselves: his daughter Tsarmina, who commands the soldiers and thinks her father far too lenient, and his son Gingivere, who would rather Kotir left the woodlanders in peace. Into this walks Martin, a young mouse travelling south, ragged and armed with the sword his father left him. He is taken by a Kotir patrol, brought before the wildcats, and refuses to submit. Tsarmina breaks his sword in front of him and has him thrown into the fortress dungeons to die there.

In the cells Martin meets Gonff, a cheerful mouse thief who has been stealing from Kotir for seasons and treats imprisonment as a temporary inconvenience. Above them, Tsarmina moves: Verdauga dies, and she takes the fortress, blaming her brother for the death and having Gingivere locked away. She proclaims herself ruler of Mossflower and sets about squeezing the woodlanders harder, with the vixen Fortunata and the pine marten Ashleg as her chief officers. Martin and Gonff break out of the dungeons and reach Brockhall, the hidden hall beneath the roots of the wood, where the woodlanders shelter. There Bella the badger, Columbine, the hedgehog Ben Stickle and the rest have been enduring rather than resisting. Martin's arrival, and the loss of his sword, turns their endurance into a decision to fight.

The woodlanders begin a campaign they cannot win outright: Lady Amber's squirrels shoot from the treetops, Skipper's otters raid from the water, and Gonff robs Kotir's stores repeatedly. The strategy is to make the fortress feed itself and then stop it doing so. Tsarmina's patrols come back beaten or not at all, and her officers start hiding bad news from her. Small victories are paid for with real losses, and Kotir still stands, too strong to storm and too well built to burn. Bella tells Martin about her father, Boar the Fighter, who left Mossflower long ago for Salamandastron, the mountain of badger lords on the western shore, and never came back. If anyone can give the woodlanders the strength to finish Kotir, it is Boar.

Martin agrees to go west and find Boar. Gonff refuses to be left behind, and Dinny the mole joins on the principle that the pair of them will walk into a hole without him. They leave Mossflower with directions that amount to guesswork. Behind them, the woodlanders keep up the raids and Tsarmina grows more erratic, seeing treachery everywhere and driving her own officers away from her. Kotir's stores dwindle through the season, and the fortress that was built to hold a wood down starts to look like a place under siege by the wood itself. Foremole and his crews begin surveying the ground around the fortress with an idea that has nothing to do with weapons.

The journey west is long and dangerous. Martin, Gonff and Dinny cross unfamiliar country, are hunted, taken in and threatened by turns, and fall in with Log-a-Log and his quarrelsome shrews, who become allies after a difficult start. They survive encounters with creatures who treat travellers as sport and are helped by others who have no reason to help them at all. The three of them are held together mainly by Gonff's refusal to be discouraged and Martin's refusal to turn back. Eventually the land begins to slope down toward the western shore, and ahead of them stands the mountain: Salamandastron, hollowed out and inhabited, held by badger lords and their hares.

At Salamandastron they find Boar the Fighter, Bella's father, an enormous scarred badger who rules the mountain with its company of hares. He will not come back to Mossflower: he knows a sea rat fleet is coming and he intends to meet it at his own mountain, and he speaks about his own end as something already settled. What he gives Martin instead is a sword, forged in the mountain's own furnace from metal that fell out of the sky, balanced for a mouse and better than anything Martin has ever held. Then the sea rats land, the mountain is besieged, and Boar leads its defence with the hares behind him while Martin, Gonff and Dinny are caught up in a battle that was never theirs.

Salamandastron holds, but Boar the Fighter dies there in the fighting, having sent Martin and his companions away from the mountain before the end. Martin turns for home carrying the sword Boar made him and the news Bella will not want to hear. The return journey is made in company, with the shrews' logboats and allies gathered along the way, and Martin arrives back in a Mossflower that has changed. Kotir is starving. Tsarmina's soldiers are deserting, her officers are avoiding her, and she is close to breaking under the pressure of a war she cannot bring to battle. The woodlanders have not been idle either: Foremole and his moles have spent the season digging, and their tunnels are not for hiding in. They are channels, dug to bring the river in under the fortress. Everything is now in place for an ending that does not depend on storming Kotir's walls at all.

The moles open the channels and the water comes. Kotir floods and settles into the ground, becoming a lake, and the garrison scatters, Ashleg and Fortunata among them. Tsarmina, whose one real fear has always been deep water, faces Martin as her fortress goes under and drowns in the flood. Gingivere is released from his cell, spared, and goes north to live quietly as a farmer. Mossflower is free. The woodlanders begin lifting the drowned fortress's stone for a building of their own, and are joined by Germaine and her community of mice from the distant abbey of Loamhedge, who have come looking for a home. Together they start raising an abbey beside the woodland road, meant to shelter and feed anyone who needs it, and they name it Redwall. Martin hangs up his sword and becomes its protector rather than its lord, and Gonff and Columbine marry as the first walls go up.

The moles' channels do their work and the river pours into the diggings beneath Kotir. The fortress floods and sinks, its stones settling into a new lake, and the garrison scatters; Ashleg and Fortunata abandon their mistress and slip away. Tsarmina, who has feared deep water all her life, is left facing Martin as her stronghold goes under, and she drowns in the flood that takes Kotir. Gingivere, freed from the cell his sister put him in, is given his life and goes north to live quietly on a farm, wanting nothing further to do with conquest. Mossflower is free for the first time in a generation, and the woodlanders begin quarrying the stones of the drowned fortress for something to build with. Germaine and the mice of Loamhedge, who arrived looking for a home, join them, and together they start raising an abbey beside the road through the woods, a house intended to shelter and feed anyone who comes to it: Redwall. Martin hangs up the sword Boar forged for him and takes the role of the new abbey's protector rather than a warlord's. Gonff and Columbine marry, and the story closes on the first stones of the abbey going up.