Like most of Bradshaw's protagonists, the heroine starts this novel more than half defeated; in her case, by being a princess of a wealthy land married to a king. She wants to be a world-renouncing Buddhist instead, not tied into 'the burning house' that is the world. Then things happen to make her life more difficult in a traditional storyish way; wars and diplomacy and a love triangle. I'm not sure the ending can be justified internally, given that it's a novel in which theology is true; a profoundly syncretic theology, as should be right on the Silk Road.
I did like it as a psychological study of a bad arranged marriage -- like A Winter's Tale. It also attacks the question of why Central Asia seems to have kept so little from Hellenism, even though we know Greek cities outlasted Alexander by generations. (I thought that was a question posed by , but I can't find it in his notes.)
Find in a Library: Horses of Heaven
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).