emerge -v x11-misc/xkeyboard-config complained that it needed the Pearl XML parser, and then died. dev-perl/XML-Parser was not listed as a dependency. When I did "emerge dev-perl/XML-Parser" and then "x11-misc/xkeyboard-config" the emerge worked fine. I think dev-perl/XML-Parser needs to be a dependency in the ebuild for xkeyboard-config.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 127591 ***